Each year, students from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering participate in satellite graduation ceremonies that complement USC’s main commencement ceremony (to be held this year on the morning of May 12). These include the Ph.D. hooding ceremony on Wednesday, May 10, and Viterbi-specific undergraduate and two M.S. graduate ceremonies on May 12th following the main USC commencement ceremony. Over 3,200 engineering students are expected to participate in these four ceremonies. The USC Viterbi satellite ceremonies will feature the following notable keynote speakers: For the undergraduate ceremony, alumnus Mark Stevens, Managing Partner, S-Cubed Capital and USC Life Trustee; for the general M.S. ceremony, alumna Melissa Orme, Vice President, Boeing Additive Manufacturing; and for the M.S. in Computer Science ceremony, alumnus Nariman Yousefi, Executive Vice President, Automotive, Coherent DSP and Switch Group, Marvell Technology.
About the keynote speakers:
Mark Stevens, S-Cubed Capital
Mark Stevens
Mark Stevens is the managing partner of S-Cubed Capital, his family investment office based in Menlo Park, California. He is also a special limited partner and former managing partner of Sequoia Capital, a globally prominent venture capital firm known for backing iconic technology companies, including Apple, Cisco, Google and Nvidia. Stevens joined Sequoia in 1989 focusing on semiconductor, software and Internet investments. He earned a B.S. in electrical engineering and a B.A. in economics (both magna cum laude) in 1981, and an M.S. in computer engineering in 1984, all from USC. He also earned an M.B.A. from Harvard University in 1989 and served as a faculty member at the Stanford Graduate School of Business from 2010 to 2017. He is a member of the Board of Councilors of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and serves on the Board of Dean’s Advisors for the Harvard Business School. He has served on the USC Board of Trustees since 2001. Stevens currently serves as a director of Nvidia, the world leader in artificial intelligence computing. He is on the Executive Board of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Foundation and is an investor and Executive Board member of the Golden State Warriors.
In 2015, he and his wife, Mary Stevens, provided a $50 million gift to endow the USC Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute, which is accelerating greater understanding of the human brain. An earlier $22 million gift in 2004 established what is now known as the USC Stevens Center for Innovation, a university-wide center that empowers USC’s faculty and students to commercialize their ideas. The couple also committed $10 million to create the Stevens Student-Athlete Academic Services floor in the John McKay sports facility, $10 million to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum restoration project, and significant gifts to the USC Caruso Catholic Center and the Viterbi School of Engineering.
Melissa Orme, Vice President, Boeing Additive Manufacturing
Melissa Orme
Melissa Orme has a rich and diverse professional background, having begun her academic career at the University of California, Irvine, where she rose to the rank of full professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. There, she established globally recognized research laboratories in the field now called additive manufacturing. Subsequently, she transitioned from academia to high-tech startups, serving as the Chief Technology Officer of Morf3D, a company focused on producing and delivering flight-qualified additively manufactured hardware to the aerospace industry. From Morf3D, she was recruited by Boeing to lead Additive Manufacturing across all business units.
Orme is a USC alumna, having graduated from the Viterbi School of Engineering with her Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctorate degrees in Aerospace Engineering.
She embodies the true Trojan Family: her husband, Vassilis Marmarelis, is a professor at the Viterbi School, and their twin sons are both pursuing their doctorate degrees at USC, also having received their bachelor’s degrees from USC Viterbi.
Nariman Yousefi, Executive Vice President, Automotive, Coherent DSP and Switch Group, Marvell Technology
Nariman Yousefi
Nariman Yousefi is responsible for Marvell Technologies’ Switch, Automotive and Coherent DSP product lines. Yousefi joined Marvell from Inphi, where he served as Senior Vice President, establishing Inphi’s leadership in the Coherent DSP market. Before this, he was the Chief Executive Officer and President of ClariPhy, where he successfully scaled the company from a startup to an innovative DSP company and eventually led to the acquisition by Inphi. Earlier in his career, he was a founding member and senior executive at Broadcom’s Networking Group, overseeing product development from inception to IPO stage and market leadership. He held multiple executive roles at Broadcom, including Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Enterprise Networking Group and Senior Vice President of Infrastructure Technologies. Prior to joining Broadcom, Yousefi held engineering management positions with Standard Microsystems and Western Digital Corporation.
He studied electrical engineering at the University of California, Davis, and received a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Pacific and an M.S. in electrical engineering from USC Viterbi.
For information about the ceremonies, please visit: https://commencement.usc.edu/viterbi/
Published on April 24th, 2023
Last updated on April 27th, 2023
