National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering President and CEO Irving Pressley McPhail to Address Class of 2015 and Receive Honorary Degree at NJIT Commencement
Newark, N.J. (PRWEB) April 22, 2015 -- New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) will confer honorary degrees upon two distinguished individuals at the 99th Commencement exercises Tuesday, May 19, 2015, 9 a.m. at the Prudential Center in Newark.
Irving Pressley McPhail, Ed.D., president and chief executive officer of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, will deliver the commencement address and receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters.
Charles Elachi, Ph.D, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a vice president at California Institute of Technology, will receive an honorary Doctor of Science.
Dr. McPhail was named the sixth president and chief executive officer of NACME on September 1, 2009. He joined NACME in 2007 as executive vice president and chief operating officer. Prior to joining NACME, Dr. McPhail founded and served as principal of The McPhail Group LLC. He served 15 years as a college president or chancellor at The Community College of Baltimore County, St. Louis Community College at Florissant Valley, and LeMoyne-Owen College. Dr. McPhail also served as Chief Operating Officer of the Baltimore City Public Schools. He is the co-editor of “Teaching African American Learners to Read: Perspectives and Practices,” published by the International Reading Association in 2005, and the author of more than 50 journal articles, chapters, monographs, and technical reports. He earned a bachelor’s degree in development sociology from Cornell University, a master’s degree in reading from the Harvard Graduate School of Education., and a doctorate in reading/language arts from the University of Pennsylvania as a National Fellowships Fund Fellow.
Dr. Elachi has been the director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) since May 2001. Prior to becoming director, he was JPL’s director for Space and Earth Science Programs beginning in 1982, where he was responsible for the development of numerous flight missions and instruments for Earth observation, planetary exploration and astrophysics. He has been a principal investigator on a number of NASA-sponsored studies and flight projects including the Shuttle Imaging Radar series, the Magellan Imaging Radar, and the Cassini Titan Radar. Dr. Elachi is the author of over 230 publications in the fields of active microwave remote sensing and electromagnetic theory, and he holds several patents in those fields. He received his B.Sc. (1968) in physics from University of Grenoble, France; the Dipl. Ing. (1968) in engineering from the Polytechnic Institute, Grenoble, and both a M.Sc. (1969) and Ph.D. (1971) degree in electrical sciences from the California Institute of Technology. He also has a M.Sc. (1983) degree in geology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an MBA (1979) from the University of Southern California.
For more information on NJIT’s 99th Commencement, visit the Commencement website: commencement.njit.edu/
About NJIT
One of the nation’s leading public technological universities, New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) is a top-tier research university that prepares students to become leaders in the technology-dependent economy of the 21st century. NJIT’s multidisciplinary curriculum and computing-intensive approach to education provide technological proficiency, business acumen and leadership skills. With an enrollment of more than 10,000 graduate and undergraduate students, NJIT offers small-campus intimacy with the resources of a major public research university. NJIT is a global leader in such fields as solar research, nanotechnology, resilient design, tissue engineering, and cyber-security, in addition to others. NJIT ranks fifth among U.S. polytechnic universities in research expenditures, topping $110 million, and is among the top 1 percent of public colleges and universities in return on educational investment, according to Payscale.com.
Tanya Klein, New Jersey Institute of Technology, http://www.njit.edu, +1 973 596-3433, [email protected]
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