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[AUDIO LOGO] KIT UMBACH: Good afternoon. Can you hear me in the back? Wonderful. My name is Kit Umbach, and I am the associate director of undergraduate studies, and it is my great privilege to commence this material science and engineering commencement ceremony for the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. We welcome graduates, parents and honored guests. Would you please rise for the entrance of the graduates?
[EDWARD ELGAR, "POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE MARCH NO. 1"]
[APPLAUSE]
You may be seated. It is my pleasure to turn the program over to the chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Professor Lara Estroff.
[APPLAUSE]
LARA ESTROFF: Good afternoon. As the chair of the department, I want to welcome all of you on what was a glorious, and now rainy, Ithaca day to our celebration and graduation ceremony for materials science and engineering. Before we begin, I would like to share a land acknowledgment.
Cornell University is located on the traditional homelands of the Gayogohono, the Cayuga Nation. The Gayogohono are members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an alliance of six sovereign nations with a historic and contemporary presence on this land. The confederacy precedes the establishment of Cornell University, New York State, and the United States of America. We acknowledge the painful history of the Gayogohono dispossession and honor, the ongoing connection of Gayogohono people, past and present, to these lands and waters.
Members of the class of 2024, students who are receiving bachelors of science, masters of engineering, masters of science, and doctors of philosophy degrees, parents and families, friends, members of the faculty, today, we are celebrating the accomplishments of each of these young people, together with their teachers, their friends, and their families. I am so proud of each and every one of you. It is an honor for me to be here at Cornell in this department addressing you today. I am facing a group of talented students who have been tireless in their pursuit of academic study and research.
Your years at Cornell have been like no other. We have all been challenged in ways we may never have imagined. And yet, here we are together, rejoicing in your successes.
Our graduating seniors, who have survived and thrived for four years in one of the most demanding curricula in the College of Engineering, you have all risen to the challenge, maintained enormous enthusiasm, created a strong community, and have been inspiring to work with in the classroom, virtually and in person, and in the department and faculty labs. We are also celebrating our masters of engineering students, who have spent a year in particularly intensive coursework, leadership training, and have completed a significant engineering project-- and our masters of science students who have spent two years almost entirely focused on their research in faculty labs. And finally, we have our PhD students who have typically spent five-plus years to become the world's leading experts on their thesis topic and who are now being awarded the highest degree offered in academia. Their extraordinary research output speaks for itself.
Throughout this ceremony, we will be highlighting the academic and research achievements of this remarkable group of individuals. Graduation is a time to thank those who helped us along the road. I want to take a moment to recognize your teachers and mentors who have taught you, guided you, and hopefully inspired you over the years. Specifically joining us today-- and please at least wave as I say your name
You've already met Kit Umbach, the associate director of undergraduate studies, Professor Mike Thompson, the director of undergraduate studies. Professor Kintu Early, the director of masters of engineering. Professor Eve Donnelly, the director of graduate studies, Professor Emmanuel Giannelis, Professor Amal El-Ghazaly, Professor Andre Singer. Professor Julia Dshemuchadse, Professor Ulli Wiesner, Professor Hari Nair, Professor Yu Zhong, Professor JJ Yeo. Professor DJ Jena, Professor Grace Xing, Professor Tobias Hanrath. Professor Tom Avedisian, Professor Sheff Baker, Professor Marty Murtagh, Professor Bruce van Dover. And we are very honored to have. Emeritus Professor Dieter Ast with us as well today.
[APPLAUSE]
You will see individual advisors coming up and standing with their graduating students throughout the ceremony. And now I look out and see the rest of the audience, the parents and friends without whom our students could not have succeeded. You must be so proud of your student.
I want to thank the parents in particular for the long years you spent nurturing and teaching your children, preparing them for college and graduate school, and for then entrusting them to us for four or more years. You have had to support them from a distance over these years, and I can only imagine how hard that has been. All my colleagues and I are well aware that our tasks as educators and mentors would have been impossible without the dedicated preparation and support you provided for so many years. Please join me in giving your parents a standing ovation for an invaluable gift that was freely given and can never be repaid.
[APPLAUSE]
And now I would like to address our graduates, the stars of the day. You are a tight-knit group full of strong, wonderful personalities. I have seen firsthand your determination and your grit as you tackled your courses and research projects.
And I have rejoiced with you to learn of accomplishments, grad school admissions, and job offers. Please know that my door is always open to you. I love hearing from our graduates over the years.
Graduation is always a time to reflect on changes, both internal and external. One of the great joys of my job is this time of year. I love graduation.
I love feeling the joy of all the students celebrating, I love meeting your parents, and I love the possibilities of the open road ahead. But I also relive memories of my own graduation over 25 years ago-- the bittersweetness of looking around at a place where I matured into adulthood and was getting ready to leave, the apprehension of what was coming next, and the sadness of knowing I would never be with this exact group of people all together and celebrating. Embrace these big emotions and find time in the coming days to savor it all.
The intensive MSE program asks students to stretch themselves in ways they haven't done before, experience new things, and develop as engineers, scientists, communicators, educators, and more. These past years, the world has asked even more of you, and you have risen to meet these challenges. You have persevered and you have emerged knowing more about materials science and engineering, yourselves, and each other.
Our graduates have researched everything from bioinspired lubricants for the cartilage in our knee joints, to understanding how the atomic structure of materials can be controlled, to make better batteries, water filtration membranes, and solar panels, using best-in-class characterization techniques to see at unprecedented spatial and temporal resolutions, how the structure and properties of materials evolve in time and space. Beyond the lab and the classroom, you have participated in project teams, contributed to and given back to our community as mentors and tutors, organized outreach activities, started companies as entrepreneurs, and advocated for causes you believe in.
As you go out into the world, I ask you to teach the people that you meet about how materials science and engineering can help our society tackle all of these truly huge grand challenges we are facing-- like the need for clean drinking water, better medicines, renewable energies, and sustainable materials. I have seen from all of you a commitment to living in this world in a way that your impact matters at a personal level and at a global level.
You have so much to offer. We are all so proud of you. On behalf of the entire faculty, congratulations.
[APPLAUSE]
At this point, we will move on to presenting a few awards, and then the diplomas. Professor Mike Thompson will be presenting the awards.
[APPLAUSE]
MICHAEL THOMPSON: Welcome. Our graduates have done a tremendous job over these last four years, not only surviving our classes, but excelling in a number of programs that range from research to lab exercises to unique design capabilities. We recognize this excellence in a series of three awards that are designated at graduation time. Without further ado, I'd like to just start with the Senior Lab Award. This is a team that has worked for a semester on a specific project.
And I would like to announce that the winners are Anna Lin and Jacob McDaniel on thermal simulation of aluminum nitride, gallium nitride aluminum nitride heterostructures for power-amplifying transistors. Please come forward. I should have asked you to come forward first.
[APPLAUSE]
All right. So hopefully, their colleagues will let them out. Professor Kit Umbach, who supervises the senior thesis projects, will be presenting the awards. All right, you got to get to the blue-- there's blue lines. The last challenge of following instructions.
[LAUGHS]
[APPLAUSE]
The second award is the Jefferies Design Award that recognizes a full design, a unique entrepreneurial opportunity. And this year's award-- I ask the members to come forward as soon as I announce them, goes to Atlas pack biodegradable food packaging with Rose Davidson, Brad Morell, Blue Shapiro and Samantha Wang.
[APPLAUSE AND CHEERING]
The award is being presented by Marty Murtagh, who coordinates the design projects. And now we'll figure out how we get five on three. All right.
[CHUCKLES]
[APPLAUSE AND CHEERING]
And our final senior award is for the senior thesis. This is a project where students spend a year working in a faculty lab doing research at the level of the PhD students. This year's award goes to Julia Chang for the investigation of electronic structure in excited-state dynamics of tetrahedral cumulenes, working in Andrew Musser and Phil Milner's groups in chemistry.
[APPLAUSE AND CHEERING]
Professor Sheff Baker will be presenting the award. All right.
[APPLAUSE AND CHEERING]
With that, I'll pass the program back to Professor Umbach for the awarding of degrees.
KIT UMBACH: Thank you, Professor Thompson. We will now proceed to the awarding of the diplomas. We will begin with those receiving the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Professor Eve Donnelly, the director of graduate studies, will be presenting the diplomas. And you will see the recipients of the PhD being hooded as a symbol of the high distinction of the degree.
[READING NAMES]
That concludes the awarding of the degrees of Doctor of Philosophy. Let's congratulate all the recipients.
[APPLAUSE AND CHEERING]
We now turn to the awarding of the degree of Master of Science. Professor Eve Donnelly will present the diplomas.
[READING NAMES]
That concludes the awarding of the recipients of the degree of Master of Science. Let's collectively congratulate all the recipients.
[APPLAUSE AND CHEERING]
We now turn to the awarding of the Master of Engineering degree. Professor Kintu Early, the director of the materials science and engineering Master of Engineering program will award the diplomas.
[READING NAMES]
Let's congratulate all the recipients of the degree of Master of Engineering.
[APPLAUSE AND CHEERING]
We now turn to the awarding of the diplomas for the degree of Bachelor of Science. Professor Mike Thompson will present the diplomas.
[READING NAMES]
Let's congratulate all the recipients of the degree of Bachelor of science.
[APPLAUSE AND CHEERING]
I now turn the program over to Professor Laura Estroff.
[APPLAUSE]
LARA ESTROFF: Excellent. Congratulations. Our ceremony is coming to a close. But before we end, I want to share with you some brief words about some of my recent musings about how our multifaceted identities can be sources of our individual superpowers, as well as the importance of learning how to see each other in our totality. It is so moving to me to behold our graduates who just walked across the stage to receive their diplomas. These amazing individuals come from so many different countries, cultures and backgrounds.
Over the past weeks and months, I have been thinking a lot about all the different facets that make up who I am and how I understand myself. The multiple facets of my own identity help guide my decisions, define the values that are important to me, and govern how I move through this world and interact with others. I am a female scientist and educator.
I am a mother, daughter, wife, and sister. I am a naturalist and a gardener. I am passionately committed to fostering diverse, respectful, and inclusive communities, and I am a Jew. And sometimes various parts of me can feel like they are in conflict with each other. And it can be confusing to try and hear, recognize, and acknowledge all the different aspects of myself.
But aiming to become aware of all my parts and show up with as many of them as I can at work, rather than hiding them away, can be a source of strength, not just for our own life, but for the work we do, and I truly believe for our community and our world. In my own research, for example, I have made choices about what to study, influenced strongly by facets of my identity. My research on microcalcifications in breast cancer grows directly out of my identities as a female scientist who recognizes the importance of studying women's health and a naturalist who is fascinated by how organisms create crystals.
In a 2022 study by Kozlowski et al, published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, they looked at millions of scientific papers to study the relationship between scientists and the science they produce. They found a strong relationship between the characteristics of scientists and their research topics, suggesting that diversity changes the scientific portfolio. There is growing evidence that as the diversity of the professorate increases, and we see positive changes as to who is at the table, how we teach improves, and what we research gets transformed.
And so today. I encourage all of you to get to know yourselves better. Think about what your core values are and to own who you truly are. And once you do that, find ways to bring more parts of yourself to everything you do. Sometimes, believe me, I know-- it feels easier to run away from some parts. But today, I urge you to take the brave step and hold your whole self in your heart.
And now here comes the even harder, but crucially important, part of what I want to share with you today. Acknowledging just how complicated it can be to know ourselves and hold the various parts of our own identities with compassion, I now ask you to consider how we tackle the essential work of approaching others-- our colleagues, our friends, even our families, with the recognition that we can never see all of the facets of their identities. We need to do the hard work of really listening to others and seeking to understand the person who is in front of us.
Let us not assume that we can understand and know others just by the pieces of their identities that are immediately obvious to us-- or worse, that are assumed based upon things we have heard or seen. It is my deeply held belief that the more interactions we have with thoughtful, smart, well-meaning people from many different backgrounds, the better we will be able to navigate this increasingly polarized and divided world. And for that reason, I will continue to advocate for and seek out collaborators and students and colleagues from around the world.
So, graduates, here is my blessing for you. I hope that each of you will celebrate and embrace your entire complicated set of identities and strive to use them to be the very best incarnation of yourself. And during those times in your life when you will inevitably be confronted by individuals with whom you may struggle to find connection, remember to turn to deep listening, to a spirit of inquiry before judgment, and strive to learn more about them, to see them as the multifaceted humans they are-- that we all are. And so with that, please join me in one last round of applause for the parents and families, you who have so tremendously supported our graduates--
[APPLAUSE]
--the faculty who have dedicated their lives to teaching and research at the highest level possible.
[APPLAUSE]
--and to you, the graduates who inspire us with your enthusiasm and accomplishments. You will always have our greatest respect, and best wishes for the future.
[APPLAUSE]
You are always welcome here in Ithaca, and I hope we will see you all come back for visits. I'm going to ask the graduates-- I know you really want to get to see your parents and your friends. But I'm going to ask you that you remain in the auditorium after the ceremony until your degree program is called for a group photo. And I want to thank all of you for having joined us in this celebration. I wish you all good health and happiness, and I hope you have safe travels wherever you are going.
[APPLAUSE]
