Nobel Laureate and Distinguished Professor Carl Wieman will give the commencement address on Friday, May 10, when the University of Colorado at Boulder will confer 4,377 degrees during the spring commencement ceremony.
The ceremony will begin at 9:30 a.m. in Folsom Stadium, regardless of the weather, and will last about an hour and a half. Commencement is free and open to the public and no tickets are required.
Guests are asked not to bring large purses or bags to the ceremony. Guests entering the stadium may be subject to search.
Wieman is a distinguished professor of physics who has taught at CU-Boulder since 1984. He is a co-winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in physics for his role in the 1995 creation of the world's first Bose-Einstein condensate, a new form of matter created by cooling atoms to almost absolute zero.
Degrees awarded will include 3,393 bachelor's degrees, 665 master's degrees, 157 doctoral degrees and 162 law degrees. The College of Arts and Sciences will lead the bachelor's degree count with 2,261 degrees, followed by the Leeds School of Business with 444, College of Engineering and Applied Science with 327, School of Journalism and Mass Communication with 215, College of Architecture and Planning with 99 and the College of Music with 47. The Graduate School will award 744 degrees and there will be 78 MBAs.
Also during the ceremony, Tim Gill and Willie L. Hill Jr. will receive honorary doctoral degrees from CU-Boulder.
Professor Hill spent more than 30 years as a music educator in Colorado. He began his teaching career in the Denver public schools where he taught instrumental music from 1968 to 1984 and then spent four years as the instrumental music supervisor for the Denver public schools.
In 1988, he joined the CU-Boulder College of Music's faculty as a professor and assistant dean. While at CU-Boulder, he established the Mile High Jazz Camp as one of the largest and most successful educational music camps in the world, bringing students from around the world to study with internationally known performers and faculty. In 1999, he left CU-Boulder to become director of the University of Massachusetts Fine Arts Center.
Gill, who graduated from CU-Boulder's College of Engineering and Applied Sciences in 1976 with a bachelor's degree in applied mathematics and computer science, founded the computer software company Quark Inc. in 1981. He went on to build Quark into a $1 billion company, before retiring from the business in 2000.
In 1994 he established the Gill Foundation. Based in Denver, it is the largest private foundation providing grants and training to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender organizations nationwide. In addition, Gill has supported national scholarship programs for women and minorities in engineering.
The upcoming summer commencement ceremony at CU-Boulder on Saturday, Aug. 10, will be the final summer commencement ceremony to be held on the Boulder campus. Last winter after consultation, the Council of Deans, associate deans, Chancellor Richard L. Byyny and the commencement committee agreed to eliminate the CU-Boulder August commencement ceremony beginning in August 2003, due to past low attendance.Ìý
Students will still graduate in the summer, however, there will be no university ceremony to mark the occasion. In the future, summer graduates will have the option of participating in the May or December commencement ceremonies.
Each spring commencement ceremony begins with the historic processional of faculty and all graduates from Norlin Quadrangle across campus to Folsom Stadium. Guests are requested to be in their seats at the stadium by 9:15 a.m. to watch the student processional, which will begin promptly at 9 a.m. on the quad.
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