More than 450 Milwaukee School of Engineering students will become proud alumni on Saturday, May 21 during Spring Commencement—including MSOE’s very first graduating class of the B.S. in Computer Science program.

The university will host two ceremonies at the Kern Center, 1245 N. Broadway and will stream them online:

• Saturday, May 21, at 10 a.m. – Graduates from programs offered by the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department; Humanities, Social Science and Communication Department; Mathematics Department; and Physics and Chemistry Department. 
• Saturday, May 21 at 1:30 p.m. – Graduates from programs offered by the Civil and Architectural Engineering and Construction Management Department; Rader School of Business; Mechanical Engineering Department; and School of Nursing.  

Dr. Dwight Diercks, MSOE alumnus and Regent, will deliver the keynote address at both ceremonies. Nathan DuPont, a computer science major from Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, will be the student speaker at the morning ceremony while Anne-Marie Warren, an architectural engineering major from El Paso, Texas, will be the student speaker in the afternoon.  

Diercks is senior vice president of software engineering at NVIDIA. His engineering team is one of the largest at the company and builds software for all of NVDIA’s products, ranging from PC and workstation graphics cards, Deep Learning Accelerators, autonomous automobile solutions, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and gaming appliances. Prior to NVIDIA, Diercks was a systems software engineer at Pellucid Inc. and a multimedia software engineer at Compaq Computer Corp. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering with a minor in business administration and an Honorary Doctor of Engineering from MSOE. He became a member of the MSOE Corporation in 2002, a Regent in 2005, and was inducted into MSOE’s Alumni Wall of Fame in 2006. He received MSOE’s Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2015. Dr. Diercks and his wife Dian generously provided MSOE with a $34 million gift to support the Dwight and Dian Diercks Computational Science Hall at MSOE and the datacenter within, which is home to Rosie, an NVIDIA GPU-accelerated AI supercomputer.