Alan McKim, graduate, trustee and entrepreneur, is Northeastern’s 2026 graduate commencement speaker
McKim has grown his company, Clean Harbors, into the leading emergency-management response company in North America.
Alan McKim, a global entrepreneur, Northeastern graduate, trustee, and philanthropist is Northeastern University’s 2026 graduate commencement speaker.
McKim, founder, executive chairman and chief technology officer of Clean Harbors, a global provider of environmental cleanup services, will address 3,400 graduate students at the ceremony on April 29.
“I have spent my career building something I never could have imagined when I started, and I still think of Northeastern as the place that made it possible,” said McKim. “I am deeply honored to speak with this graduating class.”
The ceremony will take place at 10 a.m. on April 29 at Fenway Park in Boston with 3,400 graduate students who have earned degrees across multiple disciplines, including computer science, engineering, health and business. Upon graduation, they will join a global network of more than 360,000 Northeastern alumni who live and work in over 180 countries.
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Northeastern president Joseph E. Aoun praised McKim for his entrepreneurial vision and his relentless support of the mission of higher education.
“Alan’s vision and leadership are matched only by his intellectual curiosity and generous spirit. His influence resonates not only with those around him, but far beyond. He has embraced the opportunities of the AI age and transformed his company into an industry trailblazer. He is a true inspiration to our graduating students and indeed everyone in the Northeastern community.”
McKim founded Clean Harbors in 1980 with a vacuum truck he built himself and three colleagues he recruited from his previous job at an oil clean-up company. The new company’s first job was cleaning a Texaco fuel oil tanker for $600.
Clean Harbors has grown dramatically in the years since. The company helped remediate New York City’s World Trade Center site after 9/11, cleaned up the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and medically decontaminated tens of thousands of sites during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Today, the company is the leading provider of environmental and industrial services in North America and the region’s largest emergency-management response company. Clean Harbors earned more than $6 billion in revenue in 2025, and is valued at nearly $16 billion.
But as described in his 2023 autobiography, “Doing the Doing,” McKim felt like an “accidental businessman” as he scaled up his enterprise. Earning his MBA from Northeastern in 1988 instilled in him a confidence and a focus on technology that made it clear that his success didn’t happen by chance.
McKim developed a platform to track waste and remediation jobs called the Waste Information Network. Clean Harbors also incorporated cloud-based functions to enable artificial intelligence capabilities and use the technology in billing.
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And although McKim still enjoys getting his hands dirty – he posed as an entry-level laborer for Clean Harbors and cleaned out oil tanks and cement mixers on a 2020 episode of the CBS show “Undercover Boss” – he has recently transitioned from CEO to chief technology officer to focus on the company’s future in a digital world.
McKim also has continued to take a keen interest in the future of his alma mater.
In 2012, McKim and fellow entrepreneur Rich D’Amore donated a record $60 million to Northeastern, which led to the D’Amore-McKim School of Business being named in honor of the two benefactors.’
McKim received the university’s Distinguished Entrepreneur Award in 2019, and he is a longtime member of Northeastern’s Board of Trustees, currently serving as vice chair.
In 2022, McKim gave $25 million to his alma mater to establish eight new endowed chairs across the university in honor of President Joseph E. Aoun.
McKim joins a distinguished list of Northeastern graduate commencement speakers from recent years, including Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s then-deputy prime minister and minister of finance who spoke in 2023, and private-equity leader David Roux, who spoke in 2025. Roux and his wife Barbara partnered with Northeastern in 2020 to launch the Roux Institute in Portland, Maine.
“I believe wholeheartedly in the power of a Northeastern education to transform students’ lives.” McKim said. “It certainly did that for me.”
