UW-Madison announces honorary-degree recipients

International leaders from the fields of computing, trade diplomacy and scholarly activism will receive honorary degrees from UW–Madison this month.

Computer engineer Carl Anderson, former United States Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky and Brazilian sociologist Neuma Figueiredo de Aguiar will be honored at commencement ceremonies on Friday, May 16, as part of the university’s three-day graduation weekend.

Biographical information on each of the honorees follows.

Carl Anderson
Anyone making airline reservations, involved with the stock exchange or interested in the weather forecast can thank Carl Anderson for his contributions to mainframe computing. Anderson revolutionized the digital industry by introducing new and improved high-performance computers. His design of the microprocessor that powers IBM’s award-winning Power4 system has enabled the United States to maintain leadership in an area that affects almost every aspect of contemporary society. In 1998 his work changed IBM’s mainframe system from bipolar to field-effect transistors. The result was a product that can run at gigahertz speed, allowing IBM to deliver high-end processors that perform twice as fast and at half the cost of their competition. In addition, he has earned three IBM technical team awards, two IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement awards and a Corporate Award. Currently one of the elite IBM Fellows, Anderson now is chief engineer of physical design for the IBM Enterprise Server Group. He holds 29 technology patents and serves as a mentor to a number of colleagues. He earned his Ph.D. in atomic physics from UW–Madison in 1979.

Charlene Barshefsky
Opening new trade markets for the U.S., formulating foreign policy and negotiating trade agreements have been Charlene Barshefsky’s recent stock-in-trade as President Clinton’s U.S. trade representative. During her term as USTR (1996-2001), she presided over the signing of nearly 300 trade agreements, including the U.S.-China pact which laid the groundwork for China’s admission to the World Trade Organization.

Barshefsky also negotiated agreements with South Korea, Japan, Canada, the European Union and more. In addition, she played a critical role in landmark global agreements governing information technology, telecommunications and financial services. She was instrumental in producing 22 bilateral investment treaties and helped secure improvements in protection of intellectual property rights around the world. She instituted international discussions on the links between trade policy, labor and environmental issues. After leaving the Cabinet in 2001, Barshefsky was appointed Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, and also lectures at Harvard and Yale Universities. She received her B.A. from UW–Madison in political science and English in 1972.

Neuma Figueiredo de Aguiar
A key founder of the worldwide organization Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), Aguiar became its general coordinator, a presidential position she held from 1986-1990.

During her tenure there, she inspired enthusiasm for and participation in women’s advocacy groups across the developing world. Her efforts helped spur measures to improve conditions of people in general and women in particular. Her preeminence in the study of women’s work in Brazil has contributed significantly to our understanding of the role that women play in emerging economies.

Currently engaged in an integrated study of urban growth in Brazil, China, South Africa, Eastern Europe and the United States, she will address the most pressing needs of contemporary societies. In addition, her work is universally viewed as a training laboratory for a new generation of researchers. Aguiar’s versatility in ethnographic, historical and statistical data makes her a role model for unified social science. She visited UW–Madison twice, as a Tinker Professor of Sociology and Rural Sociology in 1981 and a visiting professor of women’s studies in 1983-1984. She has been a full professor of sociology at Federal University of Minas Gerais since 1996.