It’s that time of the year! A new set of students from Brandeis University’s division of Graduate Professional Studies (GPS) are gathering their friends and family and preparing to travel to Waltham, MA to walk across the stage and receive the master’s degrees they so diligently worked toward. This year’s Rabb School of Continuing Studies commencement ceremony will take place on the Brandeis University campus on May 19, 2019. Graduates and their families unable to attend in person can stream the ceremony on Facebook or  here: http://www.brandeis.edu/streaming/rabb.html

The ceremony will feature the following speakers:

GPS Commencement Speaker: Michael Figueroa

Michael Figueroa, CISSP, is President and Executive Director of the Advanced Cyber Security Center, a Boston-based nonprofit that organizes the private and public sectors to operationalize collaborative defense, strengthening each member’s cybersecurity posture and preparing the region’s response to large-scale cyber threats. Michael has a diverse IT background, serving at times as an executive technology strategist, chief architect, product manager, and disruptive technology champion. His past work has spanned a broad spectrum: preparing cyber technologies for transition, managing research and development, applying non-security emerging technologies such as deep learning and human analytics to security problems, and serving as the Principal Investigator for a DARPA-funded effort to design and develop an innovative secure network and communications platform for cloud and mobile applications. Michael has served as a CISO for a late-stage financial services startup, was a strategic program advisor for CISOs at the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the World Bank Group, and has managed consulting teams securing large-scale systems integration efforts at DHS. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Brain and Cognitive Sciences and received his masters degree from the George Washington University (GWU) in Forensic Sciences, concentrating on High Tech Crime Investigations.

Student Speaker: Keishalee Shaw

Keishalee Shaw is a native of St. Ann, Jamaica, and was raised in Maryland.

Her passion for healthcare began at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C. where she shadowed the Hospital’s CEO and learned what it takes to run such a large operation. Soon after completing her graduate studies, she worked as a technical program assistant at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, MD. In 2006, she worked as an analyst for New York State’s Bureau of Medicaid Statistics and Program Analysis in Albany, NY.  In 2008, she was selected to be the reimbursement system senior policy analyst at Massachusetts Division of Health Care Finance and Policy in Boston. In 2011, she accepted a technical program leader position at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, where she was eventually selected for one of Blue Cross’s competitive leadership program. There, she spent four years receiving executive mentorship and training throughout different departments within Blue Cross Blue Shield of MA.

Keishalee holds a Bachelor’s of Arts in English and Literature with a minor in Political Science from the University of Maryland College Park; a Masters of Science in Healthcare Administration Management from the University of Maryland University College; a Masters in International Healthcare Management, Economics and Policy from Bocconi School of Management in Milan, Italy; and a Certificate in Public Sector Management from Cornell’s School of Industrial ad Labor Relations in Albany, New York.

Keishalee resides in Milton, Massachusetts with her husband Steven and her children, Katherine, Kristianna, William, and Alexander.

Congratulations to all of our graduates, we can’t wait to celebrate your accomplishments with you! For more commencement-related updates, follow along with us here on the blog and at #GPSClassof2019.