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Honorary Degree Recipients

tom wolf

Gov. Tom Wolf

Gov. Wolf will receive a Doctor of Public Service honorary degree. He was sworn in as Pennsylvania’s 47th governor in 2015 after spending a successful 30-year career leading his family’s York, Pa.-based business, The Wolf Organization, a distributor of lumber and other building products. He also served as secretary of revenue in Gov. Ed Rendell’s cabinet. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College, the University of London and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


David Satcher

David Satcher, M.D., Ph.D.

Doctor of Public Health
David Satcher is a physician-scientist and public health administrator with an extensive track record of leadership, research and community engagement. He served as U.S. surgeon general (1998-2002), assistant secretary for health in the Department of Health and Human Services (1998-2001) and director of the Centers for Disease Control (1993-98). Currently, Satcher is the founding director of and senior advisor for the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta.

Elaine Livas

Elaine Livas ’83

Doctor of Public Service
Elaine Livas ’83 is the founding director of Project SHARE of Carlisle, Penn. SHARE is an acronym for Survival Help and Recipient Education, and Livas’ organization has been serving the poor of the Carlisle area since 1984. A true citizen-leader who has won numerous awards for her efforts, Livas was named one of the 25 Most Influential Dickinsonians by Dickinson Magazine.

Liz Kolbert

Elizabeth Kolbert

Ms. Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her most recent book, The Sixth Extinction, received the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2015. She is also the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change and edited The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009. Her series on global warming, The Climate of Man, from which Field Notes was adapted, won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s magazine writing award and a National Academies communications award. Ms. Kolbert will join us in the fall for a campus residency.