Dwight Hutchins, the Global Managing Director of Washington, D.C.-based Accenture’s Health and Public Service Strategy practice, will be the College of Engineering’s keynote speaker at the event on Wednesday, May 8. The ceremony will take place at Thompson-Boling Arena at 11:30 a.m.

At Accenture, Hutchins leads project teams around the world helping clients define their strategy, reorganize, increase effectiveness, reduce costs, and transform their operations to become high performing public sector organizations.

Hutchins received an MPA from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, an MBA. in marketing and finance from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, and a BS in chemical engineering from here at the University of Tennessee. He co-oped at the Dupont plant in Old Hickory, Tennessee, and after graduation from UT, he began working at Procter and Gamble in Jackson, Tennessee.

Prior to Accenture, Hutchins consulted with McKinsey & Company and Bain & Company, focusing on marketing strategies for Fortune 500 banks and business products companies.

Hutchins joined Accenture seventeen years ago to build a strategy practice focused on improving the performance of government agencies. Over the course of building this practice he has made contributions across a number of areas, including homeland security, healthcare reform, economic development, and student loans.

In healthcare, he worked with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to develop its strategy and performance plans and assisted with the launch and improvement of their Health Insurance Exchange, an agency that has served as a model for national healthcare reform.

His team just completed a project for the Governor of Arizona on the actions the state should take to grow its economy and jobs by over seventy-five thousand. He is advising clients in Chicago and Atlanta on similar priorities.

At the federal level, Hutchins has led teams that have developed and implemented strategies to increase international trade and reduce delays at the border while increasing security. Specifically he helped the Department of Homeland Security develop its plan for protecting our ports from threats and risks, including those posed by terrorists and weapons of mass affect. This plan became part of the White House’s Homeland Security Council policy and was hand-delivered by the department to every member of Congress.

Internationally, he has led efforts for infrastructure investment in developing countries on behalf of the US as well as the World Bank and the United Nations.

Hutchins also led the initial phases of transforming the Federal Student Aid (FSA), the US Dept. of Education’s $100 billion per year program, into a world-class financial services operation and the government’s first performance based organization (PBO). Accenture designed, built and runs the system that originates all the federal grants and loans in the country. The Congressional Budget office has determined that this service provided via the department versus the banks saves taxpayers over $60 billion while improving services to students.