Commencement Scheduled for June 5

Nearly 2,000 graduates will receive bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees at UMass Lowell’s commencement ceremonies, to be held from 10 a.m. to noon on Sunday, June 5 at the Tsongas Arena.

Among those receiving degrees will be the first group of master’s degree recipients completing multi-campus degree programs. Four students have earned the Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology degree and one is completing the Marine Science and Technology program. Both degree programs are shared among the University of Massachusetts campuses; each student chooses the campus from which to receive his or her degree.

Vice President of the European Union Margot Wallström

Degrees conferred on June 5 will include 70 doctorates, up from the annual average of 55.

The ceremony provides the opportunity to recognize students for outstanding academic and service achievements. This year’s valedictorian will be named, along with recipients of the Chancellor’s Medal for Distinguished Academic Achievement.

In addition, four professionals will be recognized for their achievements. Vice President of the European Union Margot Wallström, John Beckwith and Eric S. Lander will receive Honorary Degrees. James V. Dandeneau will receive the Distinguished Alumni Award.

Wallström, who will deliver the commencement address, is Vice President for Institutional Relations and Communications Strategy for the European Commission, the politically independent collegial institution which embodies and defends the general interests of the European Union. She served previously as European Commissioner for the Environment, and before that as a member of the Swedish Parliament. She also served as Minister of Civil Affairs, Minister of Culture and Minister of Social Affairs in two Swedish administrations.

John Beckwith, a geneticist and microbiologist, is deeply involved in exploring issues of the social impact of science, and of genetics in particular, and in acting on concerns about this impact. In 1989, he was appointed to the Working Group on Ethical, Legal and Social Implications of the Human Genome Project of the National Institutes of Health and Department of Energy, a group formed to anticipate and disrupt possible negative consequences of the Project. From 2000 to 2002, he participated in the Behavorial Genetics Working Group jointly organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Hastings Center, the leading bioethics center in the country. Since 1986, he has worked in the Genetics Screening Study Group in the Boston area. Eric S. Lander, a mathematician, geneticist, economist and molecular biologist, is a driving force behind today’s revolution in genomics, the study of all genes in an organism and how they function together in health and disease. He was a leader of the international Human Genome Project, which completed mapping the human blueprint in 2003. He then formed the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a research collaboration of the two schools and affiliated hospitals with the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Directed by Lander, the Broad aims to advance the new field of genomic medicine.

James V. Dandeneau, who graduated in 1980 with a degree in plastics engineering, is the founder of Putnam Plastics in Dayville, CT.  Under his leadership, Putnam Plastics grew to one hundred employees and became one of the nation’s leading specialty polymer-extrusion companies serving the medical device industry.  Industry experts attributed the company’s success to Mr. Dandeneau’s ability to find innovative solutions to the challenges of manufacturing critical components.  In 2004, twenty years after its founding, Putnam Plastics was acquired by Memry Corporation. James Dandeneau was named a vice president of Memry Corporation and was subsequently elected to the company’s board of directors.

At UMass Lowell, Dandeneau returned to his alma mater in 1999 to establish the Dandeneau Family Endowed Scholarship Program for the benefit of students in UMass Lowell’s Francis College of Engineering.  Two years later, Mr. Dandeneau was inducted into the University’s Francis Academy of Distinguished Engineers.  Most recently, Mr. Dandeneau is a member of the steering committee for the 50th anniversary celebration of plastics engineering at UMass Lowell.  To mark the occasion, Putnam Plastics renovated the S.J. Chen Extrustion Laboratory in plastics engineering.

Following the University-wide commencement ceremonies, receptions for each college will be held in locations on the arena grounds.