Nobel Laureate Dr. William G. Kaelin Jr. will give the John E. Whitmore Lecture commencement address. Kaelin is the Sidney Farber Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a senior physician-scientist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He was one of three scientists to receive the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Society of Clinical Investigation and the American College of Physicians. His research seeks to understand how, mechanistically, mutations affecting tumor-suppressor genes cause cancer. He obtained his undergraduate and M.D. degrees from Duke University and completed his training in internal medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he served as chief medical resident.