*Princeton University has named its first Black American valedictorian in the school’s history.
Nicholas Johnson, a operations research and financial engineering major, is making headlines for earning top honors at the Ivy League school, The Root reports.
“My favorite memories of my time at Princeton are memories of time spent with close friends and classmates engaging in stimulating discussions—often late at night—about our beliefs, the cultures and environments in which we were raised, the state of the world, and how we plan on contributing positively to it in our own unique way,” Johnson wrote in a statement.
The school plans to hold a in-person ceremony for the Class of 2020 next spring, in May 2021, Princeton said in a statement, per cbs.com.
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Nicholas Johnson, an operations research and financial engineering concentrator from Montreal, has been named valedictorian of #Princeton20.
Congratulations, Nicholas! pic.twitter.com/pS11ep2rWZ
— Princeton University (@Princeton) April 27, 2020
The university’s statement also noted that Johnson will intern as a hybrid quantitative researcher and software developer at the D. E. Shaw Group. He will also pursue Ph.D. studies in operations research at MIT.
Here’s more background on 20-year-old Johnson via Black Enterprise:
In addition to Johnson serving as a writing fellow at Princeton’s Writing Center, he is also editor of Tortoise: A Journal of Writing Pedagogy. He is a member of Whitman College, where he has served as a residential college adviser. He is also a member of the Princeton chapter of Engineers Without Borders and served as its co-president in 2018.
During his junior year, Johnson conducted an independent research project, “Generating Privacy Preserving Synthetic Datasets,” supervised by Prateek Mittal, associate professor of electrical engineering, in which he developed a machine learning system to more robustly anonymize datasets than existing alternatives. He presented this work at the spring 2019 Electrical Engineering Symposium and the 2019 Center for Statistics and Machine Learning Symposium.
Canada-born Johnson said he’s proud to be Princeton’s first Black valedictorian.
“It feels empowering,” Johnson told CNN. “Being Princeton’s first Black Valedictorian holds special significance to me particularly given Princeton’s historical ties to the institution of slavery. I hope that this achievement motivates and inspires younger black students, particularly those interested in STEM fields.”
Princeton will have a virtual commencement ceremony for its 2020 class on May 31.
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