Honorary Degrees Awarded and Commencement Speakers

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Spring 2024 Commencement Speakers and Honorary Degree Recipient

Mina Cheon (천민정) PhD, MFA

Commencement Speaker

College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, School of Social Work, Erickson School of Aging Studies Ceremony

Mina Cheon, M.F.A ’02, Imaging & Digital Arts (Intermedia and Digital Arts), is a global Korean-American new media artist, scholar, educator and the Dean of the Undergraduate Studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) who divides her time between Baltimore, New York, and Seoul, Korea. Cheon has exhibited her political pop art known as “Polipop” internationally and draws inspiration from global media and popular culture to produce artworks that intersect politics and pop art in subversive and provocative ways.

While she creates work that ranges in medium from new media, video, installation, performance, and public projects to traditional media of painting and sculptures, her thematic focus includes geopolitical and contested spaces, race culture and postcolonialism, and Asia’s relationship to the Western world in global media culture. Cheon has worked on North Korean awareness and global peace projects since 2004 and the content of the work is in historic alignment to appropriation art and global activism art. Cheon’s specific focus on East-Asia reflects the transgenerational trauma of Korea’s history, of its division and war and of Japanese colonization. Having parents originate from the North and herself part of the Korean global diaspora, Cheon’s art results from a life-time of working with a cultural comparative lens and understanding Asia through its power relations with the world. Cheon shared her work at the Busan Biennale 2018, and has exhibited her work and/or in the collection of the Sungkok Art Museum, Seoul Olympic Museum, American University Museum, Smith College Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland Art Place Contemporary Art Center, Insa Art Space Korean Arts Council, C.Grimaldis Gallery, Lance Fung Gallery, Trunk Gallery, and represented by the Ethan Cohen Gallery in New York.

Cheon is the author of Shamanism + Cyberspace (Atropos Press, 2009). She is a professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA); was a visiting professor and lecturer at Ewha Womans University in Seoul; and a mentor of Art-Uni-On, a global mentorship network by Hyundai Co. and the Seoul National University College of Fine Arts. Cheon received her Ph.D. in Philosophy of Media and Communications from the European Graduate School, European University for Interdisciplinary Studies, Switzerland; has two M.F.A. degrees, one from Hoffberger School of Painting from MICA and another in Imaging & Digital Arts from UMBC; and her B.F.A. is in Painting from Ewha Womans University, Korea.

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The Honorable Sethuraman Panchanathan

Honorary Degree Recipient 

College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, College of Engineering and Information Technology, Division of Undergraduate Academic Affairs Ceremony

The Honorable Sethuraman Panchanathan is a computer scientist and engineer and the 15th director of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). He was nominated by the President of the United States and then unanimously confirmed by the Senate on June 18, 2020. The NSF is a $9.06 billion independent federal agency charged with advancing all fields of scientific discovery, technological innovation and STEM education.

A leader in science, engineering and education, Panchanathan has built a distinguished career in higher education and government over three decades. He has designed and built knowledge enterprises that have advanced research innovation, strategic partnerships, entrepreneurship, global development and economic growth.

As NSF director, Panchanathan maintains leadership roles on several key interagency councils and committees, including serving as co-chair of the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship and as a member of the White House CHIPS Implementation Steering Council and the White House Gender Policy Council.

Panchanathan previously served as executive vice president of the Arizona State University Knowledge Enterprise, where he also was chief research and innovation officer. He was also founder and director of the Center for Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing at ASU. Under his leadership, the university increased research performance fivefold, earning recognition as the fastest growing and most innovative research university in the U.S.

Panchanathan’s scientific contributions have advanced the areas of human-centered multimedia computing, haptic user interfaces and ubiquitous computing technologies for enhancing the quality of life for individuals with different abilities, machine learning for multimedia applications and media processor designs. For his scientific contributions, Panchanathan has received numerous awards and honors. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, and other prestigious science and engineering organizations. Before joining the NSF, Panchanathan served by presidential appointment on the National Science Board, where he was a chair of the committee on strategy. Additionally, he was chair of the council on research of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities and co-chair of the extreme innovation task force of the Global Federation of Competitiveness Councils.

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Past Honorary Degrees and Commencement Speakers