PROVIDENCE — Providence College announced that Dr. Laurie Santos, a Yale University psychology professor and host of The Happiness Lab podcast, will present the Commencement Address at the College’s 103rd Commencement exercises. The ceremony will take place on Thursday, May 20 at 11:00 a.m. on Hendricken Field on the Providence College campus.
Dr. Santos is one of five honorary degree recipients PC will honor at this ceremony. The others are: Duane Bouligny ’94, a Wells Fargo & Co. investment banker who is a former trustee and mentor to multicultural students at PC; John Chan ’74, Rhode Island’s foremost promoter of jazz and blues music, and owner of Chan’s Fine Oriental Dining in Woonsocket, RI where he has hosted performances by numerous great and upcoming musicians since 1977; Emily Leary, a Connecticut philanthropist and humanitarian who has been a long-time supporter of the College and; E. James Mulcahy ’66 retired Morgan Stanley executive and inaugural president of the College’s National Board of Overseers.
A separate ceremony for graduate students and graduates of the School of Continuing Education will take place the following day, Friday, May 21 at 6:00 p.m., also on Hendricken Field. Adam Benjamin ’91, co-founder of Upper Campus, a career learning and success platform that bridges the gaps between the student looking to learn about possible career paths, where to study for those careers, and which employers are looking for people with those skills, will be the featured speaker at that ceremony.
A cognitive scientist and professor of psychology at Yale, Dr. Laurie Santos’ course titled Psychology and the Good Life became the most popular course in Yale’s history with approximately one-fourth of Yale’s undergraduates enrolled in fall of 2018. In September 2019, she became the host of a podcast called The Happiness Lab, which examines the latest scientific research on factors that affect people’s well-being and happiness.
Dr. Santos is also the director of Yale’s Comparative Cognition Laboratory and their Canine Cognition Lab, as well as head of Yale’s Silliman College. She has been a featured TED speaker (TED Global Conference, Oxford, UK – 2010) and was listed in Popular Science as one of their “Brilliant Ten” young scientists in 2007. She also was named a “Leading Campus Celebrity” by Time magazine in 2013.
Originally from New Bedford, MA, Dr. Santos attended Harvard University. She received her BA degree from Harvard in 1997 magna cum laude in psychology and biology, and was awarded the annual Psychology Department Undergraduate Thesis Prize. She earned an MS in Psychology from Harvard in 2001 with a focus on cognition, brain and behavior, and then earned a doctorate in the same field in 2003. Her dissertation won the Richard J. Herrnstein Dissertation Prize for “the best dissertation that exhibits excellent scholarship, originality and breadth of thought, and a commitment to intellectual independence.”
