‘Today’s Sheinelle Jones Gets Emotional Over Award With Connection to Late Husband

As Jenna Bush Hager noted during the Monday, October 5, episode of Today With Jenna & Sheinelle, Sheinelle Jones had an “incredible weekend.”

The hosts kicked off the episode by recapping their weekends, with Jones noting that she had one of the “best days” of her life. “Northwestern University honored me with the Distinguished Alumnae Award, at Northwestern,” she revealed. “It was so surreal to look at this room full of some of my old professors and mentors, and they surprised me with speeches from a couple of current students, alumni, a former professor, the dean.”

She added, “For them to be there almost 30 years later, and to hear some of these students say the things that they were saying, and to sit there — I really tried to open my heart to receive it.”

In her acceptance speech, Jones said she highlighted how “special” the school is to her. “Obviously, it changed my career, but also, I met [my husband] Uche [Ojeh],” she said. “And the hall where they gave me the award was on the corner where I met Uche, and I could see right outside of the window was where I met Uche. And then I said, and then all those years later, he proposed right there on Lake Michigan, with the rocks.”

Jones and Ojeh met as students at the college and wed in 2007. The couple later welcomed three children: son Kayin and twins Clara and Uche. “Kayin mentioned to one of my professors that he had never heard that story,” Jones shared.

Jones previously took several months off from Today before it was revealed in May 2025 that Ojeh had died at the age of 45 following a private battle with brain cancer. She returned to the NBC morning show that September and took on her new role as Bush Hager’s fourth hour co-host in January.

“I met his dad the same age he is now,” Jones said of Kayin, who is currently a junior in high school. “And I didn’t know whether he would get there and not freak out a little bit, but it’s a lot to hold, or get there and love it and want to go back to school to work really hard.”

After the awards ceremony, Jones said she and her loved ones attended a Northwestern football game at Ryan Field. Kayin had so much fun at the game that Jones said he joined students in cheering for the school’s team.

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“I got back to my hotel, and I’m like, ‘Kayin, where are you, buddy?’ ‘Cause I let him go off. And he’s befriended these folks, and I’m like, ‘You can’t be in the dorm right now. You’re not a student,’” she quipped. “So finally, I sent him a text, and I’m like, ‘Buddy, time to come home.’”

Jones wrapped up the discussion by thanking everyone involved in granting her the award. “It seriously was one of the best days of my life,” she said, adding that her late grandmother, Josephine Vonceal Pace Brown, would be proud of her. (Brown died at the age of 96 in December 2025.)

She continued, “I certainly can’t make sense of all the things that have happened in my life, but in that moment, it was like, ‘I’m gonna be okay. We’re gonna be okay.’”

Today With Jenna & Sheinelle, Weekdays, 10 am, NBC