Leeds resident graduates from WPI

WORCESTER, Mass. — Leeds, Maine, resident Emily Perkins was among more than 1,000 students receiving bachelor’s degrees at Worcester Polytechnical Institute’s 150th commencement.
Perkins was awarded a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering.

The keynote address was given by Margot Lee Shetterly, author of “Hidden Figures: The American Dream, and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race.” The book, which was made into a major motion picture in 2016, shares the history of the black female mathematicians who were part of NASA’s workforce from the 1940s to the 1960s.
Shetterly told the graduates that the problems they will be asked to solve “will demand your skills as a professional, but they’ll also require you to draw on your deepest well of humanity,” saying that science and the humanities are “both rooted in the same motivation, which is to measure and understand the nature of the world, and to make the human world a better place.”