2024 Commencement Speakers

Ambassador Ahmed Aboul Gheit - Graduate Commencement Speaker

Secretary-General, League of Arab States

Ahmed Aboul Gheit was elected secretary-general of the Arab League in July 2016. Throughout his professional career, he served Egypt in several capacities, including minister of foreign affairs and permanent representative of the country to the United Nations. Between 1992 and 1996, he was the ambassador to Italy, Macedonia and San Marino and Egypt’s representative to the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. He also served as chief of cabinet for Egypt’s minister of foreign affairs as well as his political adviser. In addition, he was deputy permanent representative and a counselor at Egypt's permanent mission to the United Nations. Earlier in his career, he was the attaché-third secretary at the Egyptian Embassy in Cyprus, where he served for four years, and assumed several leadership roles within the Egyptian government and the United Nations. He was a staff adviser to the president on national security affairs, first and second secretary at the permanent mission of Egypt to the United Nations, counselor at the Cabinet of the Minister of Foreign Affairs and political counselor at the Egyptian Embassy in Moscow. Aboul Gheit holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Ain Shams University.

Dina Katabi - Undergraduate Commencement Speaker and Honorary Degree Recipient

Thuan and Nicole Pham Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Dina Katabi is an esteemed electrical engineering scholar whose research focuses on networks and congestion control, machine learning, signal processing and health diagnostics using radio frequency signals and artificial intelligence. She received a BA in electrical engineering from Damascus University and an MSc and PhD in computer science from MIT. Katabi joined MIT in 2003 as a professor of electrical engineering and computer science. Since then, she has been an influential academic, graduating generations of top students in the field. In addition to her teaching role, she is currently co-director of the MIT Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing as well as principal investigator at MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Throughout her career, Katabi received numerous awards and recognitions. She was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the National Academy of Engineering. She was also awarded the ACM Prize in Computing, recognizing her as “one of the most innovative researchers in the field of networking [who] applies methods from communication theory, signal processing and machine learning to solve problems in wireless networking.” During Project MAC's 50th-anniversary celebration, Katabi’s work on X-ray vision was chosen as one of the “50 ways that MIT has transformed computer science.” In 2015, Katabi presented her startup idea to President Barack Obama at the White House Demo Day. Earlier in her career, she won the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, recognizing her as an outstanding young computer science professional. In 2013, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and became a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Her work on Sparse Fourier Transform was chosen by MIT Technology Review as one of the top 10 breakthroughs for 2012.