Graduation went global this year with ceremonies at Carnegie Mellon campuses in Greece and Pittsburgh.
The Pittsburgh keynote address at the main campus was delivered by Candace Sheffield Matthews, an alumna recognized as one of America’s most powerful female corporate leaders.
Congressman Mike Doyle and Socrates Kokkalis, chairman of the Greek telecommunications company Intracom, addressed the first graduating class of the Information Networking Institute’s (INI) Masters of Information Networking (MSIN) degree program in Athens, Greece.
Matthews (E’81) is president of SoftSheen-Carson, a consumer products division of L’Oreal USA, Inc. The youngest of 18 children, she holds undergraduate degrees in metallurgical engineering and administrative and management sciences, as well as an MBA from Stanford University.
She attained senior marketing positions at General Mills, Cover Girl Cosmetics, Bausch & Lomb and CIBA Vision Corp. She was managing director of non-cola brands and vice president of new products and package innovation for The Coca-Cola Company. She joined L’Oreal USA in 1998 and became president of its ethnic hair care division in 2001.
Known for her emphasis on innovation and technology in the fast growing ethnic market, Matthews has been featured in Marketing Week, Black Enterprise, Essence and Jet magazines. Her commitment to the African-American community, especially regarding access to higher education, has made her an outstanding role model for American youth.
A kilted bagpiper led the 19 graduates into the main auditorium of the newly constructed Athens Information Technology (AIT) Research Center, home to the collaborative Athens MSIN program.
President Jared Cohon, addressing the standing room only crowd on video, said the Athens program is a model for Carnegie Mellon’s future global outreach programs. It’s a hybrid distance-learning program using videoconferencing, feedback mechanisms and face-to-face learning to overcome flaws in traditional remote learning models.
Dr. Cohon said the collaboration has great potential. “The program has had terrific results,” he said. “The hard part to applying it elsewhere will be finding another Socrates Kokkalis, someone who is willing to give back to his country in the manner that Mr. Kokkalis has.”
Provost Mark Kamlet called the Athens program “an amazing project.” “What particularly impressed me,” he said, “was the substantial research activity going on here. AIT now has four full-time faculty and 15 full-time researchers, all with Ph.D.s, doing work in embedded systems, optical networks and a whole host of related areas. They are publishing in excellent journals, going for patents, and, in their words, committing their hearts to the endeavor.”
Six of the Athens graduates have accepted jobs with Intracom, and all have very good job options. Kamlet said the program itself has captured national attention as “the type of aggressive action Greece needs to take to assume economic leadership in its region and to carve out a vision beyond agriculture and tourism for wealth creation.”
“It goes without saying that at the end of the day, the biggest credit by an order of magnitude is to the Information Networking Institute, Pradeep Khosla (director) and Dena Haritos Tsamitis (associate director), and the INI and AIT faculty and staff,” Kamlet said.
