South Asian American Educators, Economists, Entrepreneurs, Climate Experts to Deliver Commencement Addresses Across College Campuses

Several South Asian American educators, philanthropists will speak at commencement ceremonies at various colleges around the country. Speakers will celebrate the accomplishments of the graduating class, offer them words of wisdom, and inspire them as they embark on their future endeavors. 

Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code, CEO of Moms First, and host of “My So-Called Midlife” with Lemonada Media, is one of the speakers at the commencement ceremonies at Miami Dade College. As a leading voice on women’s empowerment, the Indian American activist has spent more than a decade “building movements to fight for the economic empowerment of women and girls, working to close the gender gap in the tech sector and most recently, fighting for the structural changes moms need and deserve including affordable child care and paid leave,” the college said in a press release. She is a New York Times bestselling author of several books. Last year, she launched “My So-Called Midlife,” a podcast with Lemonada Media that quickly entered Apple’s Top 10 show chart, reached No. 1 in Health and Fitness, and was named one of the best new podcasts of the year by TIME magazine. Saujani began her career as an attorney and Democratic organizer. In 2010, she surged onto the political scene as the first Indian American woman to run for U.S. Congress.

Graduating students at Johns Hopkins University will hear from innovative educator, entrepreneur, and author Sal Khan. Founder of the nonprofit educational organization Khan Academy, he is a former hedge fund analyst with degrees from Harvard and MIT.  He discovered his passion for education in 2004 while remotely tutoring his cousin/ Other family members soon reached out for similar help, prompting Khan in 2008 to begin recording videos of his lessons and posting them on YouTube. By the fall of 2009, he quit his hedge fund job and committed himself full-time to his growing nonprofit online endeavor. Today, his impact is demonstrated through the more than 180 million registered Khan Academy users in 190 countries. Khan will receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree at the commencement address, where about 1,450 Johns Hopkins undergraduates, 60 graduate students, and 130 doctoral students will claim their degrees.

In New York, Dr. Rajiv J. Shah, president of The Rockefeller Foundation, will deliver the keynote address at the 2025 Class Day ceremony for the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University. A leader in global development and philanthropy, Shah has dedicated his career to tackling some of the world’s most pressing challenges, including global health, economic inequality, and climate change. He previously served at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and as the US Agency for International Development (USAID) administrator. He also served as a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, which provides the Secretary of Defense with independent advice on defense policy.  Shah, who is also a medical doctor by training, launched and led innovative programs such as Feed the Future and Power Africa, helped orchestrate humanitarian missions with the US military in Haiti and Afghanistan, and played a pivotal role in containing an Ebola epidemic in West Africa and more. 

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Alumni Sonia Shah, an investigative journalist and critically acclaimed author of prize-winning books on migration, disease, and human-animal relations, will deliver the keynote address for Oberlin College and Conservatory’s Commencement ceremony. She will also be awarded an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree. Shah was born in New York City to Indian immigrants. Growing up, she shuttled between the northeastern United States, where her mother and father practiced medicine, and Mumbai and Bangalore, India, where her extended working-class family lived. Shah’s bylines have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, and the Nation. A popular public speaker and 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, Shah has lectured at universities and colleges nationwide, including Columbia’s Earth Institute, MIT, Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Georgetown. She also gave a popular TED Talk, “3 reasons we still haven’t gotten rid of malaria.”Since earning a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and neuroscience at Oberlin, Shah has been an active and generous alumna. She served as editor-in-chief of The Oberlin Review and participated in a career panel during the paper’s 150th anniversary celebration. Shah’s son, Kush Bulmer, is also an Obie; he graduated in 2022.

M. Sanjayan, CEO of Conservation International and host of the PBS series “Changing Planet,” will deliver the commencement address at William & Mary College. The Sri Lankan American will also receive an honorary degree at the May 16 ceremony. Named one of TIME magazine’s 100 top leaders for environmental protection and restoration, Sanjayan is a sought-after voice across national and international media for his conservation science expertise. As CEO of Conservation International since 2017, Sanjayan leads the organization’s work to protect and restore nature, primarily in the Global South. At the helm of the organization, he has developed critical scientific tools, built public-private coalitions for forest restoration, launched pioneering blue carbon projects, and led two capital campaigns. Before his time with Conservation International, he served as lead scientist for The Nature Conservancy, which works on creating lasting conservation in more than 80 countries and territories worldwide. Born in Sri Lanka and raised in West Africa, Sanjayan holds a master’s degree from the University of Oregon and a doctorate in conservation biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. In addition to previously being a visiting researcher at UCLA and a professor at Arizona State University, he has served as a fellow at the Aspen Institute.