Virginia Rowan Smith 2026 Rowan University Commencement Address

Virginia Rowan Smith is chairman of Inductotherm Group Worldwide, headquartered in Rancocas, New Jersey. The Inductotherm Group, leading manufacturers of melting and thermal processing and production systems for the metals and materials industry, is a global company with manufacturing facilities around the world.

Both the Inductotherm Group of companies and its sister group, the Diversified Group of companies, are managed by Indel Services, LLC, and owned by Rockbridge Technologies, LLC. Smith is on the Board of Directors of Indel Services and is a principal and director of Rockbridge Technologies, LLC.

Now celebrating 42 years at Indel Services, Smith joined the firm in 1984 as manager of Advertising & Communications for Inductotherm Corp. In 1990, she was appointed director of Advertising and later vice president of Corporate Communications for Indel Services. In addition to those responsibilities, in 2002, Smith became a group vice president for the Inductotherm Group—responsible for worldwide corporate advertising. At the same time, she became a member of the Corporate Management Advisory Board.

In 2010, Smith was appointed chairman of Inductotherm Corp., and in 2016 she was named chairman of its parent company, Inductotherm Group Worldwide.

A graduate of Cornell University, Smith holds an MBA in Marketing Management from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. She served as an account supervisor at several major international advertising agencies, including Foote, Cone & Belding and McCann-Erickson, before coming to Inductotherm. In 1998, she was inducted into Sigma Beta Delta, the international honor society for business management.

Beyond her corporate leadership, Smith serves on the Advisory Board of the Lake George Land Conservancy—an arm of the Nature Conservancy. She also serves on the President’s Advisory Committee for the Everglades Foundation in Florida. She has served on the Advisory Council for Doane Academy in Burlington, New Jersey, and serves on the Art Collections Committee at the Union League of Philadelphia. Both Smith and her husband, Manning Smith III, are active supporters of the U.S. Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation, which awards college scholarships to the children of Marines.

For two consecutive terms, from 1993 to 2006, and from 2009 to the present, Smith has been a member of the Rowan University Board of Trustees.

Smith is president of the Henry M. Rowan Family Foundation and the daughter of Henry and Betty Rowan, whose gift to Glassboro State College in 1992 remains one of the largest gifts to a public college in higher education history. Smith and her family continue to be dedicated supporters of Rowan University. They recently established the first endowed chair in the Henry M. Rowan College of Engineering.

In recognition of her distinguished leadership in global business, higher education governance and philanthropy, Virginia Rowan Smith will receive an Honorary Doctor of Humanities from Rowan University.