Samantha Power, the United States permanent representative to the United Nations, a member of President Obama’s cabinet, and a Pulitzer-prize winning author, will deliver the address at Penn’s 2015 Commencement on Monday, May 18. As U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Power works to advance U.S. interests and address pressing challenges to global peace, security, and prosperity. Prior to her current role, Power served as special assistant to President Obama and senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights on the national security staff at the White House.

“We are honored that Ambassador Samantha Power will speak at Penn’s 259th Commencement,” Penn President Amy Gutmann says. “As a national and global leader, inspiring scholar and teacher, and courageous champion of human rights, Ambassador Power has had far-ranging impact here at home and abroad.”

At the Commencement ceremony, Power will receive an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. 2015 Penn honorary degree recipients sharing the stage with Power are Arthur K. Asbury, the Van Meter Professor of Neurology Emeritus at the Perelman School of Medicine who is renowned for his clinical studies of peripheral neuropathies; Lee C. Bollinger, one of the country’s foremost First Amendment and legal scholars and Columbia University’s nineteenth president; Joan Myers Brown, the founder and executive artistic director of the widely acclaimed Philadelphia School of Dance Arts and the Philadelphia Dance Company (PHILADANCO); Rita Moreno, an award-winning performing artist and star of film, stage, and television; Ellen Ochoa, a veteran astronaut and the eleventh director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston; and Cass R. Sunstein, an author and American legal scholar in the fields of constitutional, administrative, and environmental law, as well as law and behavioral economics.