The oldest living Major League Baseball player, a former surgeon general of the United States, one of the greatest skiers of all time, and an award-winning TV and film producer are among the seven distinguished individuals who will receive honorary degrees at the 2025 Commencement ceremony on June 15.
“Each of these seven remarkable people has made a mark in their respective fields—in the arts, medicine, sports, and public service—even as they have opened doors for others and continued to serve their extended communities,” says . “On behalf of Dartmouth, it is a great privilege to be able to recognize them for all they have accomplished.”
In recent years, honorary degree recipients have included scholars, artists, innovators, public servants, philanthropists, and others who have made extraordinary contributions to their fields and society at large.
Prospective recipients are by members of the Dartmouth community. These confidential nominations are reviewed by the Council on Honorary Degrees and selected by the president and the .
This year’s recipients include:
- David Benioff ’92, award-winning television and film producer
- Judy Geer ’75, Thayer ’83, Olympic rower and entrepreneur
- William Greason, Baptist minister and former professional baseball pitcher
- Antonia Novello, former U.S. surgeon general
- Commencement speaker Sandra Oh, award-winning actor
- Mikaela Shiffrin, two-time Olympic gold medalist ski racer
- Lynn Trujillo ’94, former senior counselor at U.S. Department of the Interior
Â鶹ĘÓƵ the 2025 honorary degree recipients
David Benioff ’92 (Doctor of Arts)
A producer, screenwriter, and novelist, Benioff is best known for co-creating and executive producing Game of Thrones, the Emmy Award-winning television adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire, which aired on HBO from 2011 to 2019.
In addition to Game of Thrones, Benioff was executive producer for the 2021 Netflix comedy The Chair, starring 2025 Commencement speaker and fellow honorand Sandra Oh. He is currently co-creator and executive producer of 3 Body Problem, an adaptation of the international best-seller by Cixin Liu, which aired its first season on Netflix in 2024.
For the big screen, Benioff’s writing credits include The Kite Runner, Brothers, Troy, and Stay. In addition, he is the author of two novels: The 25th Hour, which he adapted into the 2002 feature film directed by Spike Lee; and City of Thieves, which has been translated into 35 languages. Stories from his collection When the Nines Roll Over have appeared in Best New American Voices and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and three children.
Judy Geer ’75, Thayer ’83 (Doctor of Humane Letters)
When Judy Geer transferred to a newly coeducational Dartmouth, joining the Class of 1975 in her junior year, she immediately began to take advantage of life in the north woods, majoring in ecology, singing with the Handel Society choir, helping to found the women’s swim team, and—notably—signing up to row on the women’s crew team.
With the encouragement of Dartmouth crew coaches, she successfully tried out for the U.S. Olympic rowing team, for which she competed in the 1976 and 1984 Summer Games, and would have competed in 1980 if the U.S. had not boycotted the games in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. During this period, she coached at Dartmouth and earned a master’s degree from Thayer School of Engineering.
After her Olympics career, Geer joined Concept2, a Morrisville, Vt.-based rowing equipment and exercise machine company founded in 1976 by her husband, Dick Dreissigacker, and his brother.
In 2008, Geer and Dreissigacker bought the Craftsbury Outdoor Center in Craftsbury, Vt., which serves athletes of all ages and abilities with a focus on the lifelong sports of rowing, cross-country skiing, biathlon, biking, and running. Under their leadership, the center has become a nonprofit, prioritizing sustainability and stewardship. The couple has three children, all Dartmouth alumni, and a growing number of grandchildren.
William Greason (Doctor of Humane Letters)
At age 100, the Rev. William H. Greason is the active senior pastor of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., where he has preached for almost 53 years.
Before he trained as a pastor—his calling spurred by the deadly 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, where he was a member—Greason served in the U.S. Marine Corps as one of the pioneering Montford Point Marines and fought with the 66th Supply Platoon at the Battle of Iwo Jima during World War II. And he returned from the war to become a professional baseball player, helping to desegregate Major League Baseball.
Greason began his baseball career as a pitcher in the Negro Leagues, playing for the Birmingham Black Barons, where he became a mentor and lifelong friend of fellow rookie Willie Mays. A great overall player, one of his career highlights includes game 3 of the 1948 Negro League World Series, during which he was both the winning pitcher and scored the winning run, batted in by Mays himself.
In 1952, Greason became the first Black professional baseball player in the state of Oklahoma, playing for the minor league Oklahoma City Indians. In 1954, he joined the St. Louis Cardinals as the team’s second Black player and first Black pitcher. Greason is currently the oldest living player in Major League Baseball.
He retired from baseball in 1959 and went on to study for the ministry at Birmingham Baptist Bible College and Samford University. He became pastor at Bethel Baptist in 1971.
Antonia Novello (Doctor of Sciences)
Born in Puerto Rico, Antonia Novello began her career as a practicing pediatrician in Virginia and joined the U.S. Public Health Service in 1979. She spent most of her professional career at the National Institutes of Health, where in 1986 she became deputy director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Her work on pediatric AIDS caught the attention of President George H.W. Bush, who appointed her surgeon general of the United States in 1990—the first woman and the first Hispanic person to serve in that role. In addition to her continued focus on AIDS while in office, she worked to address the health issues of women, children, and minorities, as well as underage drinking and smoking.
After her tenure as surgeon general, Novello was special representative for health and nutrition for UNICEF, vice admiral in the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, and served as commissioner of health for the state of New York and vice president of Women and Children’s Health and Policy Affairs at Disney Children’s Hospital at Florida Hospital, where she retired as executive director of public health policy.
Among many honors, Novello was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2000 and named one of the 100 Women of the Century in Science and Medicine in 2020. In 2023, she was awarded the Puerto Rico National Guard Merit Cross Medal for her services during disaster response efforts in Puerto Rico.
Novello earned both her undergraduate degree and her MD from the University of Puerto Rico and went on to complete subspecialty training at the University of Michigan and Georgetown University and master’s and doctoral degrees in public health from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health.
In 2023, Novello was part of Dartmouth’s 2023 historic convening of current and former surgeons general on the national mental health crisis, and was keynote speaker for that year’s .
Sandra Oh (Doctor of Arts)
Sandra Oh is an award-winning actor and producer who came to prominence in the U.S. for her supporting role in the 2004 hit film Sideways and for her portrayal of medical resident Cristina Yang on 10 seasons of łŇ°ů±đ˛â’s Anatomy, the breakout series created by Shonda Rhimes ’91. Oh earned a Golden Globe Award for her łŇ°ů±đ˛â’s performance in 2006.
The daughter of Korean immigrants to Canada, Oh grew up outside of Ottawa and began acting professionally in her early teens. As a young graduate of the National Theater School of Canada, she landed the title role of the Canadian TV movie The Diary of Evelyn Lau and won a Genie Award for best actress in Double Happiness, the first prominent feature film directed by a Chinese Canadian woman.
Among many comedic roles, she played personal assistant Rita Wu on the HBO series Arli$$ and the much-memed Vice Principal Gupta in the 2001 film The Princess Diaries.
The winner of four Screen Actors Guild Awards among other honors, Oh has recently starred in the 2021 horror film Umma; the 2021 Netflix academic satire The Chair, which she executive produced; the 2023 Emmy Award-winning comedy film Quiz Lady, which she co-produced; four seasons of BBC America’s Killing Eve; and the 2024 HBO adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer. She is currently executive producer and star of the independent film Can I Get a Witness, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and appears in Aziz Ansari’s upcoming film Good Fortune.
She has also voiced several animated characters, hosted Saturday Night Live, and on Sesame Street. On stage last year, Oh performed in the Off-Broadway production of The Welkin at New York’s The Atlantic Theatre. This summer, she will play Olivia in a Shakespeare in the Park production of Twelfth Night, alongside Peter Dinklage, Lupita Nyong’o, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson.
Mikaela Shiffrin (Doctor of Humane Letters)
Boasting the most wins of any Alpine skier in history, Mikaela Shiffrin has to date racked up 101 World Cup victories, including, most recently, a first-place finish at the March 27 slalom finals in Sun Valley, Idaho—capping her comeback from an early-season crash on a giant slalom course at the World Cup race in Killington, Vt., in November.
A two-time Olympic champion, eight-time world champion, and five-time overall World Cup champion, Shiffrin is the only skier to have won World Cup events in all six Alpine race disciplines, including slalom (64 first-place finishes), giant slalom (22), downhill (4), super-G (5), combined (1), and parallel (5).
Shiffrin, whose late father Jeff Shiffrin ’76 was a member of the Dartmouth ski team, spent part of her childhood in the Upper Valley, skiing for a time with the Ford Sayre Ski Club at the Dartmouth Skiway, Lebanon, N.H.’s Storrs Hill, and Whaleback Mountain in Enfield, N.H. She attended Burke Mountain Academy in East Burke, Vt., and competed in her first World Cup in 2011, at age 15.
In 2023, Shiffrin was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine and the ESPY Best Athlete in Women’s Sports. Beyond the mountain, Shiffrin is a passionate advocate for mental health. Her philanthropic work includes support for the Share Winter Foundation and Protect Our Winters.
Lynn Trujillo ’94 (Doctor of Laws)
A dedicated public servant, Lynn Trujillo—an enrolled member of Sandia Pueblo and part of Acoma and Taos Pueblos—has focused her career in state and national government as an advocate for Indigenous peoples and communities, most recently as senior counselor to then-Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland. In that role, she oversaw the Secretary’s Indian Water Rights Office, chaired the Working Group on Indian Water Settlements, and served as ex-officio member of the Reconciliation in Place Names Committee.
Previously Trujillo, who earned her JD from the University of New Mexico School of Law, was secretary of the New Mexico Indian Affairs Department, a cabinet-level position in New Mexico, and worked with tribal leadership, advocates, and legislators on passage and implementation of historic impact aid legislation and the Indian Family Protection Act.
As secretary, she oversaw the department’s efforts to provide life-saving resources to tribal communities during the Covid-19 pandemic, improve critical infrastructure, establish and support the state’s first Indigenous Youth Council, and establish New Mexico’s first Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives Task Force. The task force notably led to the creation of a state response plan and passage of several laws to address the missing and murdered Indigenous people’s crisis in New Mexico.
Trujillo’s public service also includes community outreach and organizing in Indigenous communities in her home state and with Yanesha tribal communities in Peru.
Important Commencement dates
Saturday, May 10
9 a.m. , Lebanon Opera House, Lebanon, N.H. , 14th Surgeon General of the United States, will deliver the keynote address.
Saturday, June 7
10 a.m. , Tuck Hall steps. The keynote speaker will be , president of business operations, Baltimore Orioles.
Friday, June 13
2 p.m. , Class of 1978 Life Sciences Center Lawn. The keynote speaker is , chief medical officer of ChristianaCare’s Wilmington Hospital and clinical assistant professor of medicine at Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University.
Saturday, June 14
9:30 a.m. , Dartmouth Green. Former Dartmouth provost and former Thayer dean Joseph Helble, president of Lehigh University, will deliver the keynote address.
10 a.m. Senior Class Day, the Bema.
2 p.m. , a multifaith, multicultural celebration for graduates and their families, Rollins Chapel.
4 p.m. on the Green. Reception to follow on the Class of 1978 Life Sciences Center Lawn.
Sunday, June 15
9 a.m. Academic procession to the Green. The Commencement ceremony begins at 9:30 a.m.
