John Urschel Named Spring 2016 Commencement Speaker
John Urschel, NFL offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens and Eberly College of Science alum, will speak at the college's commencement ceremony on Saturday, May 7.
John Urschel announces that he is the Eberly College of Science commencement speaker. Credit: @JohnCUrschel
Urschel was left speechless when he received news that he was named speaker, tweeting, "I cant wait to come back to the college and university I love. A place that has done so much for me and meant so much to me. I have no words."
Urschel, ’12 ’13g Mathematics, began his NFL career as an offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens in 2014. Prior to being drafted by the Ravens in the fifth round, he was the starting right guard for the Nittany Lions, where he excelled on and off the field. Urschel has won numerous awards for academic excellence, most notably the NCAA Senior CLASS Award and the William V. Campbell Trophy, which is given to the nation’s premier college football scholar athlete and is known unofficially as the “academic Heisman.”
During his collegiate football career at Penn State, Urschel was selected a first-team All-Big Ten guard and first-team Capital One/CoSIDA Academic All-American in 2012, Penn State’s 2012–13 Big Ten Medal of Honor recipient, and the recipient of a Sullivan Award, which is awarded to the nation’s most outstanding amateur athlete.
On top of a successful NFL career, Urschel is also a published mathematician. Recently he co-authored a paper in the Journal of Computational Mathematics, titled “A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians.”
He has also began work on his doctoral degree in mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the off-season and is an adjunct research assistant in the department of mathematics at Penn State.
If that's not keeping Urschel busy enough, the self-proclaimed mathlete still enjoys a few hobbies in his downtime, including chess and volunteer work.
The Eberly College of Science commencement ceremony will take place at 9:00 a.m. on Saturday, May 7 at the Bryce Jordan Center.