A top broadcast journalist and foreign-policy expert, a groundbreaking mRNA researcher, a leading scholar of earth's ecosystems, a distinguished humanitarian and executive leader, one of the nation's most prominent practicing artists, and a trailblazing oncologist will receive Johns Hopkins University honorary degrees later this month.
CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, Nobel laureate Katalin Karikó, theoretical ecologist Simon A. Levin, longtime American Red Cross president and CEO Gail J. McGovern, portrait artist Amy Sherald, and pioneering Hopkins cancer researcher Bert Vogelstein will have their degrees conferred during the universitywide Commencement ceremony on Thursday, May 21, at Homewood Field in Baltimore.
"Our honorary degree recipients this year have had a profound and lasting impact on the world in which we live, through lifesaving research, paradigm-shifting scholarship, humanitarian leadership, and artistic expression," JHU President Ron Daniels said. "We are honored to bestow the university's highest recognition on these six distinguished individuals who each, in their own way, embody our commitment to creativity, innovation, and humanity."
More on Johns Hopkins University's 2026 honorary degree recipients:
Wolf Blitzer
Wolf Blitzer is one of the most recognized and trusted figures in American broadcast journalism. For more than five decades, he has been a steady, authoritative presence covering the most important and consequential news stories of our time. His career as a reporter began in 1972, soon after he earned a master's degree in international relations from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. He joined the Reuters News Agency in Tel Aviv, then spent more than 15 years as Washington correspondent for The Jerusalem Post. In 1990, he joined CNN as military affairs correspondent at the Pentagon, where he provided insightful coverage of the Persian Gulf War. He went on to serve as CNN's senior White House correspondent, anchored Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, and in 2005 launched The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, one of the longest-running and most successful programs in CNN's history.
Katalin Karikó
Biochemist and Nobel laureate Katalin Karikó was born in Hungary, emigrated to the U.S., and in 1989 joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. There, her pioneering work was largely ignored—grant agencies repeatedly rejected her proposals on mRNA therapy, and Penn demoted her from her research faculty position. Working with a colleague, immunologist Drew Weissman, she investigated why the immune system attacks synthetic mRNA. Their finding that substituting modified nucleosides could suppress that immune response was largely overlooked by the scientific community when it was published in 2005. But in 2020, when the SARS-CoV-2 virus emerged, the mRNA platform Karikó and Weissman had refined over two decades became the backbone for the BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, the first mRNA vaccines ever approved by the FDA—a monumental, lifesaving achievement. In 2023, the pair received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their research.
Simon A. Levin
Simon A. Levin is among the world's preeminent mathematical ecologists, a scholar who has spent more than six decades weaving together mathematics, biology, and complexity theory to illuminate the forces that govern life on Earth. His foundational work on the complex dynamics of ecosystems has fundamentally reshaped how scientists understand the natural world and the urgent need to protect it. As the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University and director of the Center for BioComplexity in the High Meadows Environmental Institute, Levin has built a body of research that spans the structure and function of ecosystems, the dynamics of infectious disease, and the coupling of ecological and socioeconomic systems. He is among the pioneers of the field of spatial ecology, which analyzes natural patterns in the distribution and movement of organisms across a landscape, from seed dispersal to the seasonal migrations of wildebeest herds.
Gail J. McGovern
Gail J. McGovern was among the first women to enroll as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University, joining a pioneering group from the Class of 1974. In the decades since, she has built an extraordinary career marked by leadership, resilience, and service—rising to the highest levels of corporate America and later devoting the second act of her professional life to humanitarian leadership. From 2008 to 2024, she served as president and chief executive officer of the American Red Cross—one of the nation's oldest and most trusted humanitarian organizations—becoming the nonprofit's longest-serving chief executive since its founder, Clara Barton. Prior to joining the Red Cross, she rose to the role of executive vice president of AT&T's Consumer Markets Division, served as president of Fidelity Personal Investments, and subsequently joined the faculty of Harvard Business School. Fortune magazine has twice recognized her as one of the 50 most powerful women in corporate America.
Amy Sherald
Amy Sherald's precise, luminous canvases populated by everyday Black Americans have established her as one of the most significant portrait artists of her generation. Her signature style took shape during her time in Baltimore—she renders her subjects' skin in grisaille, a grayscale palette that decouples the figure from the concept of color-as-race, while dressing them in vivid, carefully chosen clothing against saturated backgrounds. In 2016, she became the first woman and first African American to win the grand prize in the prestigious Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Two years later, she was selected by Michelle Obama to paint the former first lady's official portrait for the National Portrait Gallery, an image that introduced her art to a global audience. Her major retrospective exhibition, American Sublime, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, recently had a sold out five-month run at the Baltimore Museum of Art and is currently on view at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.
Bert Vogelstein
Bert Vogelstein grew up in Baltimore, earned his MD at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and completed his residency in pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Cancer Institute, he returned to Hopkins as a faculty member in 1978. Ten years later, his laboratory published a landmark paper in The New England Journal of Medicine demonstrating that colorectal cancer tumors result from a sequence of genetic mutations, a finding that reoriented the field at a time when most researchers attributed cancer to infections or immune defects. The following year, the lab identified the tumor suppressor gene p53, now recognized as a factor in many cancer types and named "Molecule of the Year" by Science magazine in 1993. The work that followed mapped the genetic sequences of approximately 90 different cancers and established the foundation for personalized medicine. He received the inaugural Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences in 2013, among many other honors.
