Northeastern University will honor graduates as well as an accomplished group of influential leaders, public figures, and scholars who will receive honorary degrees on Friday in the 113th Commencement exercises.

Commencement will be streamed live. Follow on Twitter and Instagram for updates throughout the day and tweet using #NU2015, the official Commencement hashtag. In addition, news@Northeastern has launched a special news page with full coverage of this year’s Commencement and graduates.

The ceremony for the undergraduates will begin at 10:30 a.m. at TD Garden in Boston. President Joseph E. Aoun will lead the university in celebrating an accomplished group of more than 3,700 graduates.

David Muir, the Emmy award-winning anchor of ABC World News Tonight, will deliver the Commencement address and receive an honorary degree. The other honorary degree recipients at the undergraduate ceremony will be Lawrence S. Bacow, president emeritus of Tufts University; Vanessa Bradford Kerry, co-founder and CEO of Seed Global Health; and Gabriel Jaramillo, former chairman, president, and CEO at Santander Holdings USA.

Christie Civetta, SSH’15, a human services major, will deliver the student Commencement address.

The ceremony for the graduate students will begin at 3:30 p.m. at Northeastern’s Matthews Arena. The graduate commencement speaker will be G. Wayne Clough, secretary emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution and president emeritus of the Georgia Institute of Technology. He also will receive an honorary degree.

PhD hooding ceremony recognizes ‘profound intellectual journey’

Commencement activities kicked into high gear on Thursday with CommencementFest as well as the fourth-annual hooding ceremony for graduates receiving their doctor of philosophy degrees.

The hooding ceremony represents the culmination of years of scholarly study and work for the 157 students who’ve earned their doctor of philosophy this year. They will receive their diplomas at Friday afternoon’s graduate Commencement ceremony.

In his welcoming remarks, Stephen W. Director, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, called the doctor of philosophy, “proof of the most serious form of scholarship.”

Director noted the symbolic importance of the ceremony, in which faculty advisers place doctoral hoods on the degree recipients. “By so doing, we are acknowledging the completion of a profound intellectual journey,” he said, “one that advisers and graduates have traveled together.”

The academic hoods, he explained, which the graduates will wear during Commencement, represent the recipients’ enduring commitment to their disciplines utmost standards.

Amy Farrell, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, delivered the ceremony’s keynote speech. Her research focuses on understanding arrest, adjudication, and criminal case disposition practices.

She has testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee on police identification of human trafficking. She was also appointed to the Massachusetts Attorney General Human Trafficking Policy Task Force where she oversaw a committee that developed recommendations for improving the collection and sharing of data on human trafficking victims in the commonwealth.

In her address, Farrell reflected on the students’ doctoral journey, one in which they endeavor to hone their knowledge in a particular field. “Achieving a doctorate is about mastering your craft,” Farrell said, adding that while the graduates will apply their crafts to different fields, they will all ultimately be connecting theory to evidence in order to explain the physical and social world.

“Now, you embark on a new journey to use these specialized skills to solve the ever complex problems facing our modern world,” Farrell said.