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I am pleased to announce the presidential medal and honorary degree recipients at this year’s Baccalaureate and Commencement ceremonies. At the Baccalaureate ceremony on Tuesday, May 26, I will present a presidential medal to Suzanne Brenner ’81. At Commencement on Thursday, May 28, an honorary degree will be awarded to Marie Maynard Daly ’42 (posthumously) and to Lucy Freeman Sandler ’51. The honorary degree for Marie Maynard Daly will be accepted by her granddaughter Carly Reid.
Suzanne Brenner is a general partner at Brown Brothers Harriman where she advises their Investment Research Group on manager selection and capital allocation for multifamily and endowment portfolios.
She previously served as senior vice president and CIO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, overseeing a $3.2 billion portfolio, and as director of investments for The Rockefeller Foundation. Recognized by Crain’s as a 2022 Notable Woman on Wall Street, she also sits on the boards of the Carnegie Institution of Science and several New York family trusts.
A dedicated alumna of Queens College, Brenner serves on the Board of Trustees for the Queens College Foundation. Her commitment to the institution is rooted in her academic background. She trained as a classical pianist and graduated summa cum laude from Queens College. At QC, she received departmental honors in both music and accounting as well as the American Society of Women Accountants Outstanding Award and the Frances Dillon Haywood Memorial Prize in Music.
Marie Maynard Daly was a renowned biochemist and the first Black woman in the United States to earn a PhD in chemistry, which she received from Columbia University in 1947. A native of Queens, she earned her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Queens College in 1942.
Daly made important research contributions in the chemistry of histones, protein synthesis, the relationships between cholesterol and hypertension, and creatine's uptake by muscle cells. In addition to her research, she was committed to developing programs to increase the participation of minority students in medical schools and graduate science programs. In 1988, she established the Ivan C. and Helen H. Daly Scholarship at Queens College to support students of merit in the physical sciences with “demonstrated interest in issues related to minorities in science or African American studies or history.”
Lucy Freeman Sandler is the Helen Gould Sheppard Professor of Art History, emerita, at New York University, the institution from which she received her PhD in 1964. She earned her BA from Queens College and graduated cum laude in 1951. Sandler had a long teaching career at New York University in the Department of Fine Arts of the College of Arts and Science and the Institute of Fine Arts, from 1964 to her retirement in 2003; from 1975 to 1988, she was chair of the Department of Fine Arts.
She is a distinguished art historian specializing in medieval European manuscript illumination. Throughout her prolific career, she has held significant editorial roles for prestigious publications, including the College Art Association Monograph Series, Gesta, and Studies in Iconography. Her scholarship is anchored by several major works, such as Gothic Manuscripts, 1285-1385 and the recent Penned & Painted (2022), alongside seven other monographs and numerous articles exploring manuscript illumination in medieval Europe. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation.
The keynote speaker for Commencement 2026 will be confirmed at a later date. A separate email will be sent at that time.
I hope you will join us at Baccalaureate and Commencement when we will have the opportunity to see these inspirational individuals be honored for their achievements.
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