Johns Hopkins to recognize four honorary degree recipients at 2025 Commencement

A leading education entrepreneur, a local publisher and pillar of the Baltimore community, a longtime university board member and supporter, and a visionary astrophysicist and data scientist will receive Johns Hopkins University honorary degrees later this month.

Khan Academy founder Sal Khan, AFRO publisher Toni Draper, JHU board chair Lou Forster, and Hopkins scholar Alex Szalay will have their degrees conferred during the universitywide Commencement on May 22 at Homewood Field in Baltimore.

"This year's honorary degree recipients have all had transformational impacts—on how we learn, on the city of Baltimore, on our understanding of our universe, and on the trajectory of the university itself," JHU President Ron Daniels said. "We are delighted to bestow Johns Hopkins' highest honor on these four people who share our fundamental interest in cultivating a capacity for learning, on our campuses, in Baltimore, and around the world."

More on Johns Hopkins University's 2025 honorary degree recipients:

Frances "Toni" Murphy Draper

Toni Draper has proudly sustained her family's legacy of community impact in her hometown of Baltimore, including as CEO and publisher of The AFRO American Newspapers chain. Its Baltimore-based flagship publication, The AFRO, has advocated for equality and economic opportunity for Black Americans since its founding in 1892 by John H. Murphy Sr., Draper's great-grandfather. Draper's impact in Baltimore extends well beyond the AFRO's newsroom. She has served on numerous boards, including at Morgan State University—where she spent 24 years on the board of regents—as well as at the Y of Central Maryland, Associated Black Charities, the National Newspaper Publishers Association, and Word in Black. Draper, who earned a master's degree in education from Johns Hopkins University, was vice chair of Baltimore's Literacy Foundation and has been named among Maryland's Top 100 Women three times by The Daily Record, which enshrined her in its Circle of Excellence in 2000.

Louis "Lou" J. Forster

Lou Forster's connection to Johns Hopkins spans nearly five decades—he earned a bachelor's degree in international studies from Hopkins in 1982 and a master's degree from JHU's School of Advanced International Studies a year later, and he is now in the final months of a six-year term as chair of the university's board of trustees. As board chair, he has helped guide the university through a period of extraordinary growth and challenge, counseling university leaders as they navigated the myriad operational, instructional, and financial complexities of the COVID pandemic and playing an instrumental role in the development and implementation of a bold strategic vision for the university, the Ten for One. Forster's many contributions to the university also include the President's Frontier Award, which supports exceptional Hopkins scholars who are on the cusp of transforming their fields, and a new graduate fellowship program that will attract promising scientist-entrepreneurs to the university, helping to establish JHU as a leader in biomedical entrepreneurship.

Salman "Sal" Amin Khan

Educator and entrepreneur Sal Khan, JHU's 2025 Commencement speaker, has fundamentally transformed how we learn. As the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating educational videos and study materials for free online use, he has empowered millions of learners around the globe, regardless of their location or socioeconomic status. Khan's journey to creating Khan Academy began when he agreed to tutor his 12-year-old cousin, Nadia, in math, in 2004. He had such an impact on Nadia that other friends and relatives asked for his tutoring help, compelling him to upload short, explanatory videos to YouTube. By 2009, these videos had become so popular that he was able to quit his day job and dedicate himself full-time to the development of Khan Academy, which has since expanded to offer instructional videos in more than 50 languages, reaching over 170 million users in more than 190 countries.

Alexander Sandor Szalay

Astrophysicist, data scientist, and visionary innovator Alexander Szalay has profoundly shaped our understanding of the universe—and how we study it. As a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University—where he serves as Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy, with appointments in computer science, and oncology and dermatology—he has pioneered new ways of handling and analyzing large data sets, laying the foundation for advances in a wide array of scientific fields, from the exploration of the cosmos to the study of cancer. Szalay's research has produced more than 500 publications and earned him widespread recognition and acclaim. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.