This past Saturday, January 10, 2026, AUW was privileged to host distinguished scientist and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University as the Commencement Speaker at AUW’s 12th Commencement.  Below we share with you her remarks delivered at the Commencement Ceremony.  We are immensely grateful to Professor Tracey for her visit to AUW and the joy with which she embraced our community,  Ten AUW students were recognized as Irene Tracey Fellows for their superior achievement in the sciences.  These selected ten students will receive full scholarships for tuition, room, board, health care, books and supplies and other incidental expenses for the academic year 2025-26.

Thank you, Professor Tracey!

AUW Commencement Speech – Professor Irene Tracey

Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, Inspirational Founder of the Asian University of Women, Distinguished Faculty, Trustees, Esteemed Guests, and most importantly – Students and your Families and Friends.

Thank you for giving me the honour of saying a few words on this most special of days. For this is a special day – a day of pure celebration that is the culmination of many, many years of hope, aspiration and hard work – and I trust friendship and fun too. It is a day that each and every one of you should be rightly proud of – enjoy your day, for this is your day, and soak up the tangible excitement and joy.

I know I speak on behalf of my fellow honorands that we too are proud and enormously grateful to be sharing this day with you. It is a day we will remember and treasure. I count myself fortunate indeed to be receiving this degree from and alongside men and women who I deeply admire and respect. It’s also a treat for me to be on this side of a degree ceremony! And I love your gowns!

By receiving our honorary degrees, we welcome becoming part of this remarkable University’s family, and I am confident we will each play our part in supporting your visionary ambition in the years ahead. Your new campus is stunning – I cannot wait to return once complete and see it in all its glorious red brick – truly spectacular and a place worthy of the outstanding young women who study here. I was particularly thrilled, as a woman from STEM, to see the investment in new laboratories – further enhancing your ability to train and inspire the next generation of scientists that includes your work bringing in secondary school students for science summer schools.

By embracing new areas of science, such as the Centre for Antimicrobial Resistance Research and a new graduate program in Drug Discovery Sciences, or your new undergraduate major in Applied Math and Data Sciences you are not only meeting tomorrow’s needs in terms of tackling major global challenges, but making sure AUW is competitive in the higher education landscape where STEM subjects, innovation and the creation of new companies is becoming the norm for what students want from a global University – I will play my part supporting this welcome direction of travel.

As many of you know, I have had a career as a neuroscientist trying to unlock the mysteries of the human brain, how it works and how it goes wrong in various clinical conditions. I have focussed in particular on understanding mechanisms related to acute and chronic pain, as well as the major neuroscience question of consciousness. It is often said that my background as a specialist in pain was perfect training for becoming a Vice-Chancellor – maybe…..but on days like today, trust me, it’s all pleasure…joking aside, I recognise I have had a blessed and privileged career as a scientist and academic. It really is the best job in the world.

I appreciate that I owe my whole career and the joy it has brought me – and I hope the benefits it has brought society – to the education I received when I was sitting just like you here today. The Professors and technical staff who taught me, the administrative and service staff who looked after me and most importantly my family and friends who were a constant support. You the students rightly deserve all the praise in the world for overcoming unimaginable difficulties to be here – it has been truly humbling to read about you – you have displayed at such a tender young age extraordinary strength of character, resolve, determination, grit, ambition, wisdom and integrity – characteristics that will serve you well in life and have been further nurtured and enhanced during your time here, giving you the confidence and training as well as a sense of purpose needed to be the next generation that takes our societies forward.

But you have not achieved this alone and you have had the support and love of family and friends who similarly believed in you as you did in yourselves. I encourage you today to take a moment to thank all those who have helped you to get to this joyful time and place – from Parents to Professors, and I too would like to add my praise, respect and gratitude to your families for having the courage and wisdom to give you, their daughters, one of life’s greatest gifts: education. In doing so, they have not only given you life, but enabled you to receive one of life’s most transformative experiences and the greatest gift we have for enabling a kinder, fairer, healthier, and more hopeful world.
For the world desperately needs women like you. We cannot succeed as well economically, culturally, or in terms of political stability if we do not have educated women – it starts there, and it starts here. Everyone benefits with women like you in the world, so my thanks also go to the faculty, its leadership and all those foundations, trusts and philanthropists who have helped to financially support AUW.
At lunch yesterday, a brilliant scholar Nasreen from a remote part of Pakistan said that what she loved about being here, alongside the teaching and all the amazing extracurricular activities and life skills they provide was that AUW emphasises ‘it’s not about where you came from, but where you want to go’….I love that.

You are a young University. Oxford is a very old one…nearly 1000 years old. But we have more in common than you might first imagine. So, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the journey of women in Oxford. The road has not always been easy, many faced discrimination on the basis of their sex and had to fight against a system of prejudice. Despite our near 1000 year history, women were only admitted to take degrees at the University in the 1920s – just over 100 years ago. The first degree ceremony or commencement followed at the Sheldonian Theatre on 14 October 1920. Among those who received their degrees on that historic date were the Principals of the women’s colleges, former students, women tutors, administrators, and women prominent in the educational and reform movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Principal of one of the colleges of Oxford, St Hugh’s, Eleanor Jourdain, recalled the 14^th of October 1920 therefore as ‘a woman’s day, and a day for women to remember’.  If I was alive in the late 1800s, I could not have studied at Oxford on two counts: being a woman, and being a practicing Roman Catholic. It took bold leadership, often from men, alongside strong and bold women to hope for a better future and to have the determination to make Oxford evolve and change.

Since then, many truly excellent women have studied and researched at Oxford and gone on to achieve remarkable feats, starkly illustrating the lost opportunity to society by not educating women. In 2020, exactly 100 years since the first women were admitted to the University for degrees, Professor Sarah Gilbert from Oxford’s Jenner Institute, and her team at the Oxford Vaccine Group, began their work on developing a vaccine for coronavirus, which saved millions of lives and over £2 Trillion to the global economy.

Also in 2020, Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, the then 22-year-old Pakistani activist, took her final examinations at Oxford. She is an international advocate for the education of girls and supports scholarships for Pakastani students to study at Oxford.

And finally, in August 2020 – The very first Black College head of house, Baroness Valerie Amos, was appointed as Master of University College, Oxford. A champion of equality and humanitarianism throughout her career, Baroness Amos has been a Labour life peer since 1997. She has played a key role in tackling discrimination in both education and the workplace, and in enabling international emergency relief efforts. And now a woman and practicing Roman Catholic is Vice-Chancellor.

These few examples of women from all walks of life and time periods are united by their commitment to education and the relentless pursuit of knowledge, undeterred by daunting circumstances or challenges. Women just like you.

I cannot help but reflect that today’s Commencement celebration, is also ‘a woman’s day, and a day for women to remember’.
When the World Bank/UNESCO Task Force on Higher Education & Society produced the ‘Peril and Promise’ report over a quarter of a century ago in 2000, notably aided by your very own Kamal Ahmad, they could not have anticipated its effect as a real catalyst for rethinking global education in developing countries.

The Task Force report urged policymakers and donors to work with educational leaders and other key stakeholders to reposition higher education in developing countries to produce larger and better trained pools of graduates and research of higher quality. It concluded by recalling the famous quotation of H.G Wells in The Outline of History; ‘Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.’

The baton was picked up by Kamal, Mrs. Cherie Blair and former Japanese First Lady Akie Abe, Mr. Amir Khosru, former Commerce Minister, Dr Osman Farruk, former Education Minister, and several others – all of whom have been advocating for AUW the world over for years. I am honoured to share the stage with people who have such hope, kindness and determination. And I am proud that Oxford University has been the recipient of 22 AUW scholars for graduate studies, and that we have supported several one-year teaching fellowships for recent Oxford graduates to teach on your pre-undergraduate program. It delights me too that several of your faculty have degrees from Oxford. This is a great foundation to build on, particularly with our University of Sanctuary status providing further graduate scholarships for students from displaced backgrounds. An area championed and greatly facilitated by my fellow honouree, Baroness Jan Royall during her time as Principal of Somerville College. But let us do more together.

After a fabulous day here witnessing first-hand the brilliance of your students and seeing the dedication of your faculty and leadership, I am struck by just how much AUW exemplifies the very best of what the World Bank/UNESCO Task Force on Higher Education could have hoped for – it is the model to follow. From your Access Academy, the Pathways for Promise programme and your vibrant undergraduate studies offering, AUW has planted its flag firmly on the world-stage of transformative higher education.

An independent and self-governing higher education system is vital for advancing responsible civic societies, equitable growth and opportunity. It takes courageous and confident political leadership with a long-term vision to allow this to happen. If Universities are to be the discoverers of truth through their research, the disseminators of truth through their teaching and the curators of truth with their libraries and databanks, then we have to be free to question and challenge. It is the price you pay if you want people trained and able to tackle and find solutions to the greatest challenges of our time, whether that’s climate change or disease, and to drive economic growth from the discovery research and training we provide. I applaud the support AUW has in this regard as the only institution in Bangladesh that has a Parliament-granted charter that makes it independent enjoying wide and vitally necessary privileges of academic freedom and institutional autonomy.

And we should not underestimate the additional role Universities, especially ones like AUW, play in what I call ‘soft-diplomacy’ – having students from different countries, backgrounds, cultures, faiths or none, meet and develop understanding and tolerance towards others ‘not like me’ – so that when you become the leaders of the future, which you will, you have a greater understanding and trust of each other leading to more stability, community-building and peace.

I promise that as you move forward and begin to take your rightful place in the world, you will look back and realise that your degree was the foundation stone for your future career.

Through your individual studies you have learnt not simply subject knowledge, but even more importantly how to learn and acquire new skills – training you will benefit from in a world certain to change and where you must adapt. You have also learnt how to distinguish the true from the seemingly true – challenges that your generation will need to meet with the rise of fake news, disinformation and now the arrival of AI that will provide extraordinary opportunities as well as difficulties for us as humans to live alongside – difficulties you must help us tackle.

Today is bittersweet as you start the process of physically leaving AUW, but know that for all students of our great academic institutions you never actually leave us because you become part of the global family of alumni.

Remember fondly your time here, remember to support AUW in the years to come as your life unfolds, and remember to support each other throughout your lives. You are extraordinary individuals with extraordinary talents – the world needs people like you. I normally tell Oxford students to go and put more into the world than you take out, but in your case I want the world to put more into you first and then please, please use your gifts and talents for the betterment of society; and get out there and change the world. Congratulations once again to you all and thank you.