Physician and Novelist Abraham Verghese Named 2025 Harvard Commencement Speaker

Updated February 27, 2025, at 4:02 p.m.

Stanford University biology professor, physician, and novelist Abraham Verghese will deliver the keynote address at Harvard’s 374th Commencement ceremony in late May, the University announced Thursday afternoon.

Verghese will address Harvard’s Class of 2025 during the Commencement’s Morning Exercises, which will be held in Tercentenary Theater on May 29.

An esteemed physician, Verghese is best known for his work pioneering a humanistic approach to medicine. At Stanford, he founded Presence, a program focused on restoring the importance of the patient-physician relationship in an increasingly digitized healthcare system, and established Stanford Medicine 25, a training program for bedside patient care.

Verghese is also the author of several best-selling novels. His first memoir — titled “My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story” — reflected on his experiences treating AIDS patients in rural Tennessee during the early years of the epidemic. The book was nominated as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and adapted into a hit film.

Verghese — a National Humanities Medal recipient — also authored the New York Times bestseller “The Covenant of Water” in 2023. The fictional tale, which describes a family’s struggle with a mysterious condition, landed in Oprah’s Book Club.

"Throughout his remarkable career, Dr. Abraham Verghese has followed his wide-ranging interests to carve a unique path distinguished by breathtaking creativity, outstanding achievement, and exemplary service and leadership,” Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 wrote in a press release. “I count myself among his legion of admirers, and I cannot imagine a better individual to inspire the members of our Class of 2025 as they contemplate their future.”

Garber, who taught at the Stanford School of Medicine for 25 years, worked alongside Verghese for four years before moving to Cambridge in 2011 to become Harvard’s provost.

Verghese was born in Ethiopia to Indian parents and moved to India for medical school at Madras Medical College. He then immigrated to the United States to complete his medical residency at East Tennessee State University.

In a brief interlude from his medical career in the early 1990s, Verghese earned a Master's of Fine Arts at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Verghese began his teaching career at Texas Tech University, before moving to the University of Texas in 2002 to serve as the founding director of the school’s Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics. In 2007, he joined the Stanford University School of Medicine, where he has taught medicine since.

Verghese will take the stage in May after last year’s Commencement ceremony, which took place just days after the end of the pro-Palestine encampment in Harvard Yard, was marked by student protest and campus tensions.

More than 1,000 Harvard affiliates staged a walkout in support of the 13 undergraduates who were barred from graduation because of their involvement in the encampment, and several student speakers went off-script to address protests on campus.

Last year’s keynote speaker — Maria Ressa, a Nobel Prize-winning journalist — also addressed protests on campus, saying that “protests give voice” and “they shouldn’t be silenced.” But Ressa was confronted onstage by Harvard Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi, who accused her of antisemitism.

Verghese is the first physician to address the graduating class since 1996, when Harold E. Varmus, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and former director of the National Institutes of Health, delivered a talk. Other recent Commencement speakers include actor Tom Hanks, former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland ’74.

—Staff writer Dhruv T. Patel can be reached at dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @dhruvtkpatel.

—Staff writer Grace E. Yoon can be reached at grace.yoon@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @graceunkyoon.