Jamaica-based Northern Caribbean University will confer an honorary doctor of science degree on Shirlene Henriques, a former chief executive officer of the Cayman Islands Health Services Authority, who graduated among the first batch of NCU-degreed nurses in 1974.
The honorary doctorate will be awarded to Henriques at the university’s 100th commencement exercise on Sunday, 13 Aug.
The ‘robing and hooding’ ceremony will take place in Grand Cayman at the George Town Seventh-day Adventist Church, on Smith Road, at 8am on Sunday, presided over by president of the Cayman Islands Conference of Seventh-day Adventists Ivor Harry, assisted by Livingston Smith and Joan Latty, according to a press release from organisers.
Henriques retired as CEO of the Health Services Authority in 2008 after a 34-year nursing and healthcare career.
In 2021, she was made an Officer of the Order of the Cayman Islands for distinguished services to nursing and the Cayman community.
During her nursing career, Henriques was awarded the Cayman Islands Certificate and Badge of Honour in 1995 for her work with AIDS patients. She worked as the in-service education coordinator at Cayman’s then-only hospital, where she introduced LPN (licensed practical nurse) training.
The release noted that, as a testament to the rigorous standards of the initiative she introduced, several of the first batch of graduates completed their bachelor of science in nursing in Florida in two years.
Henriques is well known in the Cayman community for her philanthropic initiatives, led by her Manna House Pantry, which has been collaborating with the Cayman Food Bank since 2018 in distributing food to families in need.
She is the third Caymanian NCU graduate to be conferred with an honorary doctorate from NCU, after Wilton McDonald, who received an honorary doctorate of divinity in 2013, and Linford Pierson, former Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, who was conferred an honorary doctorate of public service in 2021.
At the 100th graduation ceremony, more than 700 graduands from 77 academic programmes offered across the institution’s four colleges and one school are eligible for the conferral of certificates and degrees. The 100th graduation exercises are being held from 10-13 Aug. in the gymnatorium on the Mandeville campus of NCU.
NCU president Lincoln Edwards described the 2023 graduating class as “prestigious, not only because of the determination” that took graduates to where they are today, but because this is “the 100th graduation ceremony since the institution opened its doors on this hilltop”.
Others to be awarded honorary doctorates at the 100th graduation exercises include Audrey Sewell, the recently appointed Cabinet Secretary of the government of Jamaica, on whom NCU is expected to confer the honorary doctor of public service. Jamaican-born hotelier and businessman Dennis Morgan, who is also an alumnus of NCU, will receive the honorary doctor of commerce degree.
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