The Honorary Doctorate is the highest award that Tulane University confers. It is awarded only at Commencement. Honorary degree recipients are individuals who exemplify the university's commitment to the highest standards of scholarship, creative work or community engagement. In conferring an honorary degree on an individual, we not only honor that person, we also put on display what the university values as a community. The specific criteria for honorary degrees can be found here.
Commencement 2023 Honorees
Dr. Rosalind Picard
Honorary Doctorate of Science
Dr. Rosalind Picard is a pioneer of affective computing or “Emotion AI,” which seeks to train computers to recognize and respond appropriately to human emotional cues. Her book Affective Computing is internationally recognized as the cornerstone of this field, and she has published over 350 peer-reviewed articles in digital health, machine learning, wearables, and affective computing. She is also an inventor and entrepreneur, having co-founded two companies to bring her life-enhancing and lifesaving technologies to market: Empatica, the first AI-powered smartwatch approved by the FDA to monitor seizures, and Affectiva, whose Emotion AI software and services were recently acquired by SmartEye, a global company dedicated to reducing traffic fatalities through Driver Monitoring Systems. She is a professor at the MIT Media Lab, where she teaches and directs research. She also serves as founding faculty chair for MindHandHeart, MIT’s campus-wide wellbeing initiative.
Quint Davis
Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters
For over 50 years, Quint Davis has been the driving force behind the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. While still a student at Tulane’s University College (now the School of Professional Advancement), he left to answer a call for local co-producers to launch the first Jazz Fest, and the rest is history. He took the original vision of impresario George Wein and built Jazz Fest into an international phenomenon by showcasing Louisiana music, food and crafts alongside national headlining acts. With hundreds of thousands of attendees making the pilgrimage to the Fairgrounds each year, Jazz Fest’s annual impact on the New Orleans economy numbers in the hundreds of millions. Additionally, Jazz Fest promotes, preserves and perpetuates the music, culture and heritage of local communities through free programs, lectures, music lessons, and more offered by the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation. In 1995, Quint partnered with Essence Magazine to design and produce the Essence Music Festival (now the Essence Festival of Culture), and led it into becoming the foremost African-American social and entertainment event in America.
