2026 Master’s Ceremony

Date: Friday, May 15, 2026
Time: 2:00-5:00 p.m. (doors open at 12:00 p.m.)
Location: The Palestra, 223 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA

Keynote Speaker

Vanessa Lyon (GEng’24)

Vanessa Lyon is a Managing Director and Senior Partner at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a global strategy consulting firm that partners with business and societal leaders to drive transformation and create lasting impact. Based in New York, she brings more than 25 years of experience designing, deploying and securing large-scale technology platforms.

At BCG, Lyon advises leading industrial companies, working with them to build transformative technology platforms and helping organizations integrate artificial intelligence. She is the founder of BCG’s Enablement service line (BOT, “Build-Operate-Transfer”), helping companies insource technology capabilities. Lyon is also the creator of BCG’s Center for Leadership in Cyber Strategy, where she leads a series of studies and initiatives examining the implications of AI and cybersecurity for large-scale systems.

Lyon has a background in Mathematics and Engineering. She is a graduate of French École Polytechnique (1998) and École des Ponts et Chaussées (2001) and holds a Master of Computer and Information Technology (MCIT) from the University of Pennsylvania (2024), completed through Penn Engineering Online.

Beyond her professional work, Lyon is actively engaged in advancing science and engineering communities. She serves on the Board of Governors of the New York Academy of Sciences and on the Board of Online Engineering Education for Penn Engineering. Before joining BCG, she held several operational leadership roles in industry, including positions in supply chain management and information technology.