During the 375th Commencement this morning, Harvard will confer honorary degrees on five distinguished recipients, including journalist Peggy Noonan, AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, and comedian Conan O’Brien. Three men and two women will be honored:
- Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI” and winner of a Nobel Prize in Physics;
- Sir Noel Malcolm, a historian and political journalist expert in the intricacies of European history;
- Audra McDonald, the singer and actor, and Tony Award-winning Broadway star;
- Peggy Noonan, a Pulitzer prize-winning columnist for the Wall Street Journal; and
- Conan O’Brien, the comedian, writer, and producer.
Brief biographies of today’s honorands appear below. (The guest speaker—this year O’Brien—has traditionally been recognized as the final degree recipient.) For details on the conferrals, follow Harvard Magazine’s Commencement coverage at www.harvardmagazine.com.
Geoffrey Everest Hinton: A Britain-born computer scientist known for his early work on artificial neural networks, Hinton won the 2018 Turing Award for his work on deep learning. In 2024, he was co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics for “foundational discoveries” enabling machine learning using artificial neural networks. He used his Nobel acceptance speech to simultaneously emphasize the immense promise of AI to enhance productivity, and the dangers that the technology amplifies, from mass surveillance to the potential creation of pandemic diseases and autonomous killing machines.
Hinton received his B.A. in experimental psychology from the University of Cambridge in 1970 and his Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1978. Known as the “Godfather of AI,” Hinton is currently distinguished professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Toronto, where his research group’s breakthroughs in deep learning revolutionized speech recognition and object classification.
In 2013, Hinton became a part-time employee of Google, when the company acquired DNNresearch Inc., a Canadian artificial intelligence startup he co-founded with two graduate students. A decade later, Hinton resigned from Google to enable him to speak freely about the dangers of AI. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” he told the New York Times in 2023. He has since become a leading advocate for AI safety, and urged the programming of a “maternal instinct” toward humans, to lessen the likelihood that AI, once it develops its own agency, will harm humanity.
Sir Noel Robert Malcolm: A British historian, political journalist, and scholar of early modern Europe and the Balkans, Malcolm is widely respected for his work on Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, the Ottoman world, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Educated at Eton College and later at Peterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge, he began his career as a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, before moving into journalism. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, he served as a political columnist and foreign editor for The Spectator and later as chief political columnist for The Daily Telegraph.
Malcolm, who reportedly speaks or writes more than a dozen languages, returned to academic life in the mid-1990s, and has since become one of Britain’s leading public intellectuals. He spent a year at Harvard in 1999 during the Kosovo war, when he was an important source of information about the history of discrimination against Albanians, who were then threatened with genocide. Since 2002 he has been a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. His books, including Bosnia: A Short History, Kosovo: A Short History, and two major critical editions of Hobbes’s works, have earned international recognition for their depth, clarity, and independence of judgment. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2001 and was knighted in 2014 for services to scholarship, journalism, and European history.
Malcolm’s academic interests range from intellectual history and political philosophy to the complex history of the Balkans and Europe’s relationship with the Islamic and Ottoman worlds. By combining rigorous scholarship with a journalist’s prose clarity, Malcolm has become influential in both historical and contemporary political debate.
Audra Ann McDonald: An acclaimed American actress and singer whose career has made her one of the most celebrated performers in Broadway history, McDonald was born in Berlin, Germany, and raised in Fresno, California. She studied classical voice at the Juilliard School before quickly rising to prominence on the New York stage. Just one year after graduating, she earned her first Tony Award for her role in the 1994 revival of Carousel, beginning a remarkable run of success in theater.
Over the ensuing two decades, McDonald established herself as a powerhouse performer across musicals, plays, opera, and concert work. She won additional Tony Awards for Master Class, Ragtime, A Raisin in the Sun, The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess (for a role she originated at Harvard’s American Repertory Theater), and Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill. McDonald was the first performer to win in all four acting categories—supporting and lead actress in a play and musical—and the actor with the most Tony performance wins in history. Beyond Broadway, she has earned Emmy and Grammy Awards, appeared in television series such as Private Practice and The Good Fight, and performed with major orchestras and opera companies around the world.
McDonald has also been recognized for her cultural impact and advocacy within the arts. In 2016, she received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama, and she later co-founded Black Theatre United to support diversity and equity in the theater industry. Continuing to challenge herself artistically, she has taken on demanding modern roles such as Suzanne Alexander in Ohio State Murders and the iconic Mama Rose in Gypsy, further cementing her reputation as one of the greatest stage actors of her generation.
Margaret Ellen “Peggy” Noonan: The author of numerous books on American politics, history, and culture—five New York Times bestsellers among them—Peggy Noonan is a Pulitzer prize-winning columnist for the Wall Street Journal, where her weekly “Declarations” column has run since 2000. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1950, she began her career in broadcast journalism at CBS Radio before moving into political communications.
As a speechwriter in the Reagan White House, she crafted several of President Ronald Reagan’s memorable addresses, including his speech after the space shuttle Challenger disaster. She also wrote speeches for Vice President George H. W. Bush and later served on Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign. She wrote Bush’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, in which he delivered the memorable phrase, “Read my lips: no new taxes.”
Noonan subsequently became a bestselling author and prominent political commentator. Widely respected for her prose and political insight, Noonan’s recent columns include “How Not to Respond to Political Violence,” “Trump Meets His Match in Pope Leo,” “A Republic, Not a Mood,” and “The Oprah State of the Union.” She remains an influential voice in American political commentary.
Conan Christopher O’Brien: A fixture in comedy for four decades—and a former Harvard Lampoon president—O’Brien wrote for Saturday Night Live and the Simpsons before rising to prominence as a late-night talk show host on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, The Tonight Show, and Conan. In recent years, he has hosted a pair of acclaimed travel shows (Conan Without Borders; Conan Must Go) and the popular interview podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.
O’Brien grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts and served two terms as president of the Lampoon. He graduated in 1985 with a degree in History and Literature and wrote his undergraduate thesis on “Literary Progeria in the Works of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor”—once, a fan handed him a photocopy of the paper right before he stepped onstage for a performance. “I knew then it was time to die,” he joked later.
O’Brien joined the writing staff of SNL in 1988 and became a writer on The Simpsons in 1991, penning classic episodes including “Marge vs. the Monorail” and “Homer Goes to College.” In 1993, he began his talk show career on NBC’s Late Night, kicking off a three-decade run as a TV talk show host. He has won multiple Emmy Awards, and in 2025 received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
Read a detailed account of O’Brien’s career here.
