FAIRFIELD—Entrepreneur, inventor and philanthropist, Brian Hamilton ’87, will deliver the commencement address at Sacred Heart University’s 53rd undergraduate commencement exercises on Sunday, May 12, at 10 a.m. He will receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, degree. Sr. Rosemary Donley, professor, Jacques Laval Endowed Chair for Justice for Vulnerable Populations, at the Duquesne University School of Nursing, will also receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, degree at the ceremony.
The University’s graduate commencement will take place on Saturday, May 11, at 10 a.m., with Mary Healey-Sedutto, executive director, Hope for a Healthier Humanity (HHH), delivering the address. She will receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, degree.
Both ceremonies will be at the Webster Bank Arena in Bridgeport.
The SHU class of 2019 includes 1,122 undergraduates who will have earned bachelor’s degrees and 1,152 graduate students who will have earned master’s degrees, professional certificates and doctorates.
Hamilton co-founded Sageworks, the country’s first fintech and largest provider of software to U.S. banks. He sold the company to a leading private equity firm in 2018. He is also the founder of Inmates to Entrepreneurs, a national program that helps people with criminal records start their own small businesses, and the Brian Hamilton Foundation, which provides access to entrepreneurship to people who wouldn’t otherwise have it.
Hamilton holds multiple patents for his work automating financial analysis. He is a frequent guest on CNBC and Fox and is regularly quoted in and writes for all the major national media publications. His is also a contributor to Inc. and Entrepreneur magazines.
The first in his family to attend college, Hamilton holds an undergraduate degree from Sacred Heart University, where he previously served on the Board of Trustees, and an MBA from Duke University’s graduate school of business.
“I am honored to return to Sacred Heart to address this year’s graduates. My experiences at Sacred Heart had a profound impact on the trajectory of my life and my career, and I’m sure their time at the University will have a similarly significant impact on the class of 2019. I am looking forward to sharing in their commencement,” Hamilton said.
Healey-Sedutto has held many senior management positions in the metropolitan New York City area. For more than 30 years, she served as a visionary leader in health care systems, including president and chief executive officer of the Catholic Health Care System in the Archdiocese of New York. In this role, she worked with John Cardinal O’Connor and other health-care and medical leaders to establish a strong, comprehensive and accessible model of health care delivery in the Archdiocese.
In 2001, she stepped out of corporate life to follow her passion for serving the poor. She and her husband, Stanley Kosan, DDS, founded Hope for a Healthier Humanity, a charitable foundation providing strategic planning and technical health care delivery support, donations of medical equipment and supplies and teams of visiting physicians, dentists and nurses who provide pro bono services to Caribbean and Latin American countries. Oscar Cardinal Rodriguez Maradiaga is chairman of the organization’s executive board.
Healy-Sedutto also founded the Pan American Catholic Health Care Network, a charitable organization with Catholic approbation from the Holy See, Vatican. With an international board of trustees, the organization engages in strategic planning in collaboration with HHH in Panama, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and the Dominican Republic.
She received her doctorate in public administration from New York University.
For more than three decades, Donley taught health policy at the Catholic University of America. During that tenure, she served as dean of nursing (1979-86), executive vice president (1986-97) and chief operating officer. She was instrumental in developing and teaching community health nursing graduate courses, which focused on the care of vulnerable populations, including inner-city residents, immigrants and refugees. She is a leader in nursing education, research and public service whose career has been devoted to providing better care for the underprivileged and the chronically ill.
In her current role, Donley seeks to ground nursing actions in social justice and to assist others to work in the community and at the policy level to lessen the impact of injustice. She believes that nurses have phenomenal opportunities to achieve these goals.
As a renowned educator and scholar, Donley is a fellow in the American Academy of Nursing and a member of the Institute of Medicine. She was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow (1977-78). She is past president of the National League for Nursing and Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing, and past senior editor of Image: The Journal of Nursing Scholarship. She has served as a member of the Secretary of Health and Human Services Commission on Nursing; has been a consultant to the U.S. Army and Navy Medical Commands; and has served on the Tri-Service Nursing Research Programs panel of reviewers.
She received her master’s in nursing education and doctorate in higher education/public health from the University of Pittsburgh and her BSN from St. Louis University.
(To download photos of this year’s speakers, visit https://www.dropbox.com/sh/97h6myyp7wqa2be/AAAOdrY5jC-8tyAyuIHj2sh9a?dl=0.)
About Sacred Heart University
As the second-largest independent Catholic university in New England, and one of the fastest-growing in the U.S., Sacred Heart University is a national leader in shaping higher education for the 21st century. SHU offers more than 80 undergraduate, graduate, doctoral and certificate programs on its Fairfield, Conn., campus, which is located about an hour from Manhattan and 2.5 hours from Boston. Sacred Heart also has satellites in Connecticut, Luxembourg and Ireland. More than 8,500 students attend the University’s eight colleges and schools: Arts & Sciences; Communication, Media & the Arts; Computer Science & Engineering; Health Professions; the Isabelle Farrington College of Education; the Jack Welch College of Business; Nursing; and St. Vincent’s College. Sacred Heart is rooted in the rich Catholic intellectual tradition and the liberal arts, yet at the same time develops students to be forward thinkers who enact change—in their own lives and professions and in their communities. A spirit of service, entrepreneurship and social justice is the essence of who we are and can be seen inside and outside the classroom as students learn how to make a difference far beyond Fairfield. The Princeton Review includes SHU in its Best 384 Colleges–2019 Edition, “Best in the Northeast” and Best 267 Business Schools–2018 Edition. It also placed SHU on its lists for “Happiest Students” and “Most Engaged in Community Service,” each of which comprises only 20 U.S. schools. Sacred Heart has a Division I athletics program. www.sacredheart.edu
