Printer FriendlyU.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Keynote Address
Governor Deval Patrick, Featured Speaker
U.S. Sen. John Kerry, Speaker
U.S. Rep. Niki Tsongas, Speaker
State Sen. Steven Pangiatakos, Speaker
UMass President Jack Wilson, Speaker
Board of Trustees Chairman Robert Manning, Speaker
Keynote Speaker
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
Since 1987, Nancy Pelosi has represented California's Eighth District in the House of Representatives. The Eighth District includes most of the City of San Francisco including Golden Gate Park, Fisherman's Wharf, Chinatown, and many of the diverse neighborhoods that make San Francisco a vibrant and prosperous community. Overwhelmingly elected by her colleagues in the fall of 2002 as Democratic Leader of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi is the first woman in American history to lead a major party in the U.S. Congress. Before being elected Leader, she served as House Democratic Whip for one year and was responsible for the party's legislative strategy in the House. On January 4, 2007, Nancy Pelosi was elected Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.
Pelosi hails from a strong family tradition of public service. Her father, Thomas D'Alesandro, Jr., served as Mayor of Baltimore for 12 years, after representing the city for five terms in Congress. Her brother, Thomas D'Alesandro III, also served as Mayor of Baltimore.
Pelosi graduated from Trinity College in Washington, D.C. in 1962. Pelosi and her husband, Paul Pelosi, a native of San Francisco, have five children: Nancy Corinne, Christine, Jacqueline, Paul and Alexandra, and six grandchildren.
Learn more about Congresswoman Pelosi
Featured Speaker
Governor Deval Patrick
Governor Deval Patrick was elected in November of 2006. He brings to the Governor’s office a broad range of leadership experience at the top levels of business, government, and non-profits. From an early age, he has built his life on hope, and traced a trajectory from the South Side of Chicago to the U.S. Justice Department, Fortune 500 boardrooms, and now the Massachusetts Statehouse.
Patrick is a graduate of Milton Academy. He received his degree from Harvard University, with honors, in 1978 and spent a post-graduate year working on a United Nations youth training project in the Darfur region of Sudan. He returned to Cambridge to attend Harvard Law School in the fall of 1979.
The Commonwealth’s first African-American Governor, Deval Patrick came into office with a grassroots message of hope, community and hard work. By focusing on transparency and inclusion, he hopes to increase accessibility to government and encourage the civic engagement so crucial to shared progress in education, health care, economic development and other issues.
Diane and Deval Patrick have been married for over two decades and have two college-age daughters, Sarah and Katherine. The Patrick family has lived in Milton, in a house on Deval’s high school paper route, for the last 17 years.
Learn more about Governor Patrick
Speakers
U.S. Senator John Kerry
Not long after John Kerry was born on Dec. 11, 1943, his family settled in Massachusetts. Growing up there, his parents Richard and Rosemary taught him the values of service and responsibility and the blessings of his Catholic faith, lessons John Kerry carries with him to this day.
As he was graduating from Yale, John Kerry volunteered to serve in Vietnam, because, as he later said, "it was the right thing to do." Kerry served two tours of duty. On his second tour, he volunteered to serve on a Swift Boat in the river deltas, one of the most dangerous assignments of the war. For his leadership, courage, and sacrifice under fire, he was decorated with a Silver Star, a Bronze Star with Combat V, and three Purple Hearts.
Later, John Kerry accepted another tour of duty - to serve in America's communities. After graduating from Boston College Law School in 1976, John Kerry went to work as a top prosecutor in Middlesex County. He took on organized crime and put behind bars "one of the state's most notorious gangsters, the number two organized crime figure in New England." He fought for victims' rights and created programs for rape counseling.
John Kerry was elected lieutenant governor in 1982. Two years later, he was elected to the U.S. Senate and he has won re-election three-times since. He is now serving his fourth term, after winning again in 2002 by the largest margin in Massachusetts history.
As chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, he worked closely with John McCain to learn the truth about American soldiers missing in Vietnam and to normalize relations with that country. As the ranking Democrat on the East Asian and Pacific Affairs Subcommittee, he is a leading expert on that region, including North Korea.
In his life of public service, John Kerry is sustained by his loving family. He is married to Teresa Heinz Kerry, and they have a blended family that includes two daughters, three sons, one grandchild, and a German shepherd.
Learn more about Senator Kerry
U.S. Rep. Niki Tsongas
Niki Tsongas is currently serving her first term as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives representing the 5th Congressional District of Massachusetts. She is the first woman to be elected to Congress from Massachusetts in 25 years. The 5th Congressional District of Massachusetts includes the old industrial cities of Haverhill, Methuen, Lawrence and Lowell in the Merrimack Valley as well as the Boston suburbs of Concord, Acton, Wayland and Sudbury.
Rep. Tsongas was elected in a special election on Oct. 16, to succeed Marty Meehan, who resigned to become the Chancellor of UMass Lowell. She currently serves on the House Armed Services Committee and the Budget Committee. Before her election to Congress, Rep. Tsongas served as the Dean of External Affairs at Middlesex Community College, the largest community college in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Growing up in a military family, Rep. Tsongas has lived across the United States, post-war Germany, and she graduated from an American High School in Japan. Congresswoman Tsongas earned her bachelors degree from Smith College and she has a law degree from Boston University. While in college, she spent a summer in Washington, D.C. where she met her future husband, former 5th District Congressman, U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Paul Tsongas.
Sadly, Paul Tsongas passed away in 1997 after a well-known fight with complications from cancer treatments. Inspired by their life together, Niki has continued her dedication to public service, building on what she and Paul had accomplished.
Congresswoman Tsongas has three daughters, Ashley, Katina and Molly.
Learn more about Representative Tsongas
State Sen. Steven Panagiotakos
Steven C. Panagiotakos lives in Lowell, two blocks from the home in which he was raised. He is currently serving his sixth term as State Senator of the 1st Middlesex District, which includes the City of Lowell, and the towns of Dunstable, Groton, Pepperell, Tyngsborough and Westford.
Appointed as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Ways and Means in March 2007, Chairman Panagiotakos is charged with the oversight and development of the
Commonwealth’s $26.8 billion budget.
Senator Panagiotakos has a long history of community and political involvement,
particularly in the area of education. For the past decade he has served as a board member of Big Brothers, Big Sisters of Lowell.
Before being elected to the State Senate in 1997, he served two terms in the
Massachusetts House of Representatives and two terms as a member of the Lowell
School Committee.
The Senator attended Phillips Academy, received his Bachelor’s degree from Harvard
University, and obtained a Juris Doctorate from Suffolk University Law School. He
maintains a law practice not far from his home in Lowell.
Senator Panagiotakos and his wife, Christine, are the proud parents of two daughters, Giana and Alexandria.
UMass President Jack Wilson
Jack M. Wilson was named president of the five-campus, 60,000-student University of Massachusetts on March 24, 2004. He had served as interim president since September, 2003. Previously, he had served UMass as the vice president for Academic Affairs and as founding CEO of UMassOnline. He is a tenured professor of Management at UMass Amherst.
Prior to arriving at UMass, Wilson was the J. Erik Jonsson '22 Distinguished Professor of Physics, Engineering Science, Information Technology, and Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he also had served as a Dean and interim Provost.
As the CEO of UMassOnline, he helped to build the system-wide initiative into one of the largest externally directed online programs in the United States, with 64 graduate and undergraduate degree and certificate programs now serving more than 21,000 enrollees.
Wilson is nationally and internationally known for his leadership in the reform of higher education programs, winning the Theodore Hesburgh Award, the Boeing Award, and the Pew Charitable Trust Prize for his innovative programs. He was awarded an Outstanding Civilian Service Medal by the U.S. Army for service to the Army Education program. He is a Fellow of American Physical Society, and has served as a national officer of the Physical Society, American Institute of Physics, and the American Association of Physics Teachers. He has also served as a member or chair of several National Academy of Science and National Research Council study committees and task forces.
Wilson was the founder, CEO, and Chairman of the LearnLinc Corp., founded in 1993 as a spin-off of his university research. After several mergers he formed the publicly traded (NASDAQ) Mentergy Corp., leaving the company in the next year.
Wilson earned his bachelor's degree at Thiel College in 1967, his master's degree in 1970 and his doctorate in 1972 in Physics both from Kent State University.
Wilson lives with his wife Judi and their two children, John and Jessica in Westboro. He also has two grown daughters, Gretchen and Erika.
Learn more about President Wilson
Board of Trustees Chairman Robert Manning
ULowell graduate Robert Manning, a past member of the 22-member UMass Board of Trustees, was elected its chairman in December. Manning, named to the board by then-Gov. Mitt Romney in the fall of 2006, is CEO, president and chief investment officer of MFS Investment Management in Boston, a financial firm with oversight of $204 billion in assets. He has been with the company 23 years, since joining it as a junk-bond analyst three months out of school in the fall of 1984.
Among his priorities as board chairman, he says, will be a closer working relationship with the Legislature to augment funding for capital improvements, and an increase in annual giving through a more active promotion of the bond between alumni and their schools.
Manning, who lives in Swampscott, grew up in Methuen, as did his wife Donna. The two met in high school, attended ULowell together—where he majored in management and computer science, she in nursing—married, and went on to their respective careers. She is today an oncology nurse at BU Medical Center, and serves on the advisory board of the UMass Lowell Nursing Department. Together, the two have created the Donna and Robert Manning Endowed Scholarship Fund, which provides two $3,000 scholarships annually to UMass Lowell students, one each from the College of Management and from the nursing program of the College of Health and Environment.