EAST LANSING. Mich. – Michigan State University’s three fall commencement speakers epitomize the university’s land-grant mission – each has roots in history and heritage with an eye on the future.
Jared Diamond, scientist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” and Mary R. Dawson, curator emeritus of vertebrate paleontology with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, and a pioneer in the field of zoology, will address undergraduates at two commencement ceremonies.
Diamond will speak at the 10 a.m. Saturday, Dec. 10, undergraduate ceremony, and Dawson will speak at the 2 p.m. undergraduate ceremony on Saturday. They both will be awarded an honorary doctor of science.
Jonathan K. S. Choi, a Hong Kong entrepreneur, philanthropist and proponent of integrating Eastern and Western educational practices, will address candidates for advanced degrees at the 7 p.m. Friday, Dec. 9, ceremony. He will be awarded an honorary doctor of humanities.
“Our commencement speakers are recognized globally for their innovations, discoveries and boldness in their respective fields,” said MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon. “We are pleased our students, who soon will be making their marks in societies throughout the world, will be able to draw upon experiences of individuals who have successfully met challenges and who continue to work to improve society.”
All fall MSU commencement ceremonies will be held at the Jack Breslin Student Events Center, One Birch Road.
Diamond, professor of geography at the University of California-Los Angeles, has authored several books on the rise and fall of human civilizations and the gulf between rich and poor in a global economy, and other issues facing society today. He also is the author of the best-selling books “The Third Chimpanzee” and “Why is Sex Fun?”
Throughout her career Dawson, an MSU alumna who resides on a farm near Saxonburg, Penn., has performed field studies of major significance to the scientific community. She uncovered the first prehistoric mammals within the Arctic Circle, in addition to fossil remains of alligators and tortoises, demonstrating that 55 million years ago the area was warm and frost-free swampland.
In 2004 Choi, chairperson of the Hong Kong-based Sun Wah Education Foundation, established two education centers – the “U.S.-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence” at MSU and the “China-U.S. Education Research Center” at Beijing University, with the aim of developing effective models for basic education in China by combining the efforts and resources of two top universities in the two countries.
Students attending the 10 a.m. Saturday ceremony are in the colleges of Arts and Letters, Education, Social Science, James Madison College and The Eli Broad College of Business. Baccalaureate degree College of Human Ecology majors in child development and in family community services will participate in this ceremony and be seated with the College of Social Science.
The undergraduate student speaker at the 10 a.m. ceremony will be Philip Lauri of West Bloomfield, a supply chain management major in The Eli Broad College of Business.
Students attending the 2 p.m. Saturday ceremony are in the colleges of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Communication Arts and Sciences, Engineering, Natural Science and Nursing. College of Human Ecology majors in apparel and textile design will participate in this ceremony and be seated with the College of Communication Arts and Sciences.
Lindsey Burke of Brighton, a journalism major in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences, will be the undergraduate student speaker at this ceremony.
Biographies of the speakers follow:
Jonathan K. S. Choi
Jonathan K. S. Choi, president of the Hong Kong-based Sun Wah Group, was educated in Hong Kong and Japan. He continues to make donations to universities and schools in China and has recently extended his research and studies on integrating Western and Eastern educational programs to the banks of the Red Cedar at Michigan State University.
The U.S.-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence has partnered with MSU and other professors and Chinese scholars to research and develop effective models of education that integrate strengths of both Eastern and Western practices. The center, which is housed at MSU, will look at the whole of schools and what works in administration, teachers and teaching, curriculums and parental and community involvement, among other issues.
Choi, who also has established the “China-U.S. Center for Advanced Educational Research” at Beijing Normal University, has been involved in funding education at all levels in China for more than 20 years, including sponsoring summits on education reform.
He heads a group of companies in six principal areas – food and seafood, real estate, financial services, infrastructure, technology and media. He serves as chairperson of the Sun Wah Hi-Tech Group and the SW Kingsway Capital Group.
His public positions include serving as a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference of the People’s Republic of China, as an economic adviser to the president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and as a standing committee member of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce.
Choi is the founder of the Choi Koon Shum Chinese Academy of the Sciences Honorary Academician Foundation and other science and technology centers and institutes. He serves on the court or councils of many universities and is involved in many charitable organizations, including those for the welfare of ethnic minority and disabled communities in China.
Mary R. Dawson
Mary R. Dawson’s love for animals and plans to become a veterinarian brought her to Michigan State University. After her sophomore year she switched her major to zoology to study animal history rather than animals with illnesses.
After graduating from MSU with a bachelor of science in 1952, she accepted a Fulbright Scholarship to study paleontology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and received a doctorate from the University of Kansas in 1957.
Her scientific work focuses on how animals, especially vertebrates, developed during the Cenozoic Era, and she studies fossil evidence of mammalian evolution, paleobiogeography and environmental change. She concentrates on the interval between 55 million and 35 million years ago, and on animals that inhabited the northern continents.
In 1975 she uncovered the first fossil evidence for a very high latitude fauna dating to about 50 million years ago, when the Arctic, inhabited by alligators, tortoises and other mammals, was a warm, temperate region. She also discovered a long record of 45 million to 25 million-years-old vertebrate living in and around what is now Montana’s Glacier National Park.
She provided evidence of a land bridge from North America to Europe. In 2001, she provided the first documented occurrence of mammals having a North American origin, migrating to Western Europe 50 million years ago.
In 2002, Dawson became the first American woman and only the second woman to receive the prestigious Society of Paleontology’s A. S. Romer–G.G. Simpson Medal. In 1981, she received the National Geographic Society’s Arnold Guyot Prize in recognition for her work in the Arctic. In 1987, she was named a “Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania” by Gov. Bob Casey.
Her career since 1962 was as a curator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. She was curator and head of the Department of Veterabrate Paleontology since the early 1970s. Dawson also served as acting director of the museum and as an adjunct professor of the Department of Geology and Planetary Science at the University of Pittsburgh.
Jared Diamond
Since 1977, Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California-Los Angeles, has been devoting much of his time to popular science writing in order to convey understanding of important scientific issues, including animal behavior, linguistics, archeology and anthropology, to the general public.
He began his formal training in physiology and biophysics while pursuing a parallel career in ecology and evolutional biology. He combines his academic research in population biology with practical efforts toward halting the disappearance of the world’s biodiversity.
Diamond has teamed with MSU faculty to write a paper published in Nature on changes to China’s environment and the country’s relationships with other nations in protecting the environment and working to achieve economic sustainability.
Diamond has been the leader of more than 21 expeditions to New Guinea and nearby islands, and has designed comprehensive national park plans for the governments of Indonesian New Guinea, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.
He received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and doctorate from the University of Cambridge in England. He is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He received the National Medal of Science in 1999 for his work in all his various fields of study, and the Pulitzer Prize for the best book in the category of general nonfiction in 1998. He has received numerous awards and honors as a writer and scientist in the United States and throughout the world.
He serves as a consultant to the World Wildlife Fund and the Indonesian government, and is the founding member of Club of Earth within the National Academy of Sciences. He serves on the board of directors of the World Wildlife Fund U.S.A. and Seaecology.