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[AUDIO LOGO] JOSEPHINE MARTELL: Welcome, graduates, loved ones, and distinguished guests to the PhD Recognition Ceremony. I am Josephine Martell, associate Dean of Academics of the Graduate School. The academic procession is about to begin. Please take your seats and kindly clear the aisles. Also, please take a moment to make sure that the ringers on your cell phones are turned off.
We ask that you remain in your seats and do not get up to take photographs during the ceremony as we have a professional photographer who will do that for your graduates and for you. As a safety precaution, please take a moment to locate the exit closest to you. In case of an emergency, listen carefully to the instructions over the PA system. Thank you.
The academic procession will begin with University Marshal Professor Poppy McLeod, leaving President Martha E. Pollack, Provost Michael I. Kotlikoff, and Dean of the Graduate School and Vice Provost for Graduate Education, Kathryn J. Boor, who will process into the hall. Next, will be the Cornell University College Deans.
Following the Deans, Chair of the Board of Trustees, Craig Jayser will lead members of the Board of Trustees and University leadership. The University faculty will be led by the Dean of Faculty, Professor Eve De Rosa Finally, more than 350 PhD candidates will proudly process into the hall to their seats near the stage.
As part of today's ceremony, I would like to take a few moments to acknowledge that Cornell University is located on the traditional homelands of the Gayogohono The Gayogohono are members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an alliance of six sovereign nations with a historic and a contemporary presence here on this land. This Confederacy precedes the establishment of Cornell University, New York State, and the United States of America.
Our University acknowledges the painful history of Gayogohono dispossession and we honor the ongoing connection of Gayogohono people, past and present, to these lands and waters. Thank you for joining us today.
[APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
KATHRYN BOOR: Good evening. I am Kathryn Boor, Dean of the Graduate School and Vice Provost for Graduate Education. I am delighted to welcome the members of the Board of Trustees, the faculty, University leadership, college deans, degree candidates--
[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE]
--and your families and your guests. The assembly is hereby called to order. And now it is my honor and great pleasure to introduce to you, Provost Michael Kotlikoff.
[APPLAUSE]
MICHAEL KOTLIKOFF: Good afternoon, everyone. It's a little warm today. Thank you, Dean Boor. I'm delighted to celebrate this wonderful milestone with all of our doctoral candidates and to welcome and thank your friends and families who are here with us and to honor those who couldn't be here. Thank you as well to our faculty members who have offered guidance and support to these scholars.
Candidates, your family, friends, and mentors have encouraged you through times of challenge as you have pursued your degree, and they've celebrated each and every success with you. Let's take a moment to thank them. Please stand and recognize those who have helped you to reach this important moment in your academic career.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you. Thank you. A PhD is distinguished from other degrees of broad knowledge and competency because of the knowledge created and the years of intellectual engagement and research required of candidates. You have reached the pinnacle of knowledge or expertise within your specific focus in your field, and your PhD serves as recognition of the deep commitment and drive to discover new knowledge in your area of study and to share that fresh understanding with others.
My fellow faculty members and I are glad to have worked alongside of you as you've grown from students to peers. You have developed thoughtful and innovative perspectives in your dissertation and made significant contributions to your area of focus, in which you are now the world's experts.
We're also grateful for how many of you have advanced the education and understanding of your fellow Cornellians as you've developed your teaching skills. Thank you for allowing us to be part of your journey to discover and disseminate knowledge. On behalf of the faculty, I offer my congratulations and best wishes for your future success and look forward to hearing of all your accomplishments in the future years.
And now I'm delighted to introduce our faculty guest speaker who was invited to speak today by the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly, Professor of Physiological Genomics and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Sciences, Director for the Center for Vertebrate Genomics, and my friend and colleague, Praveen Sethupathy.
[APPLAUSE]
Praveen leads a research lab focused on genome scale and molecular approaches to understanding physiology and human disease. After receiving his BA degree from Cornell University and his PhD in genomics from the University of Pennsylvania, Praveen completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the NIH at the National Human Genome Research Institute under the mentorship of NIH director Francis Collins.
In 2011, he moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as an assistant professor in the Department of Genetics. And in 2017, he returned to Cornell University as one of the first recruits in the Provost's Genome Biology Radical Collaboration Initiative.
Praveen's work has been recognized with many honors, including selection, in 2011, by Genome Technology as one of the nation's top-25 rising young investigators in genomics, a Faculty Merit Award for Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring, the prestigious American Diabetes Association Pathway to Stop Diabetes Research Accelerator, which is awarded to only three people a year, and the inaugural Boehringer Ingelheim Award for Excellence in Research Mentorship.
Praveen has authored over 145 peer-reviewed publications in journals such as PNAS, Cell and Science, and has served as a reviewer for over 50 journals. Please join me in welcoming Professor Praveen Sethupathy.
[APPLAUSE]
PRAVEEN SETHUPATHY: Congratulations, graduates and welcome, again, to family and friends and mentors and many others. Thank you. Dr. Kotlikoff, It's an honor to be here with all of you today, all of you graduates, and all of those who helped you to arrive to this point. I really want to appreciate and thank the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly, as well, for the very kind invitation to share this time and space with you and to offer some brief remarks on this important and celebratory day.
So today, you graduate with your PhD from the best Ivy League University. Oh, sorry, I said the silent part out loud. What I meant to say was a wonderful institution that you've called your academic home for several years.
I started my post-secondary journey, as Dr. Kotlikoff said, here at Cornell as an undergraduate, and I decided to come back here as faculty, in part, because this is truly a very special place. There's so much I could point to on this campus the waterfalls, the Dairy Bar. Botanic Gardens, the unbeatable sunsets, Not Stewart Avenue, though. Is anyone ever going to fix that road?
[LAUGHTER]
But the best part of the Cornell experience is the people. Two decades after my own PhD, what I remember most are the people. The admin staff who kept the graduate program running. The custodial staff who kept the offices clean. The colleagues who became friends. The professors who inspired me. Even the thesis committee members who never stopped with the difficult questions.
One particularly demanding committee member told me, years after my own graduation that he was hard on me because he really believed in me, and he didn't want me to settle for less than what I could be as a scientist. I'm really grateful for so many people like him who saw something in me, who invested in me, and laid a foundation for me.
I hope each and every one of you graduates take the wonderful opportunity on this special day to think about and be grateful for the many people whom you've crossed paths with during your time here at Cornell as a graduate student. Might be someone you see every day, who you leaned on during good times and bad.
It might be someone you saw only once, but they inspired you with an idea, or they challenged you. Might be someone you met and married and will hopefully be with for the rest of your life and grow old with. All of these people are part of your graduate journey. Part of what makes today so unique. Part of who you will be going forward.
There are two really quick thoughts I'd like to share with you today. The first is that no two academic journeys are the same. Confidently carve your own path. It's tempting, I've been there, to compare yourself with your colleagues. But you are not them. You are someone with a unique set of skills and talents and values and experiences, and those have shaped your interests and your goals and who you are today. Find the people who will support you, who will empower you, and persevere.
On my first day in graduate school, all the students in my cohort, were talking about a new technological revolution in genomics called the microarray. It's passé now, but it was all the rage back in genomics 25 years ago. I was the only one in the cohort who didn't know what it was. One of the students in the program told me, genomics may not be for me and that I was in the wrong place. And for a moment, I really did wonder if I was.
But no two journeys are the same. The question I asked myself that night was, am I passionate about this? Because if the answer is yes, then I will go learn what a microarray is. And if I need to play catch up, then that's what I'll do. If I need to work harder to get where I need to be, then so be it. Maybe I won't make it, but it won't be because I listened to someone who thought that all journeys look the same. Today, I'm not only department chair but also the director of a genomics center. So confidently carve your own path.
The second thought, wherever you go, seek out beauty. It's really what makes everything worthwhile in the end. I think of beauty as a kind of irresistible invitation towards something that can't really fully be grasped. And in this way, beauty is actually really a mystery.
Higher studies, they're not just about mastering a subject. It's about pursuing a mystery. To me, as a scientist, science isn't just a dry collection of techniques and skills to master so that we can work out the details of some mechanism. It's actually an invitation. An invitation to explore the world around me and to be drawn further and further into a reality that I'm increasingly certain I will never fully understand.
The famous 19th-century French polymath Henri Poincaré, he said that the scientist does not study nature just because it is useful. They study it because they delight in it. And they delight in it because it is beautiful. No matter your area of study, it's easy to slip out of that sense of wonder. But wherever your next step takes you, I hope that you will allow yourself to seek out beauty, to find delight. It's what makes it all worthwhile.
Warm congratulations to each of you Cornellians on your PhD and may the road rise up to meet you on the next part of your journey. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
KATHRYN BOOR: Thank you, Dr. Sethupathy, for those words of encouragement. And now, I want to introduce Vice Provost for International Affairs, Wendy W. Wolford, and Professor of History, Durba Ghosh, who will read the names of our graduates as they cross the stage. Graduates will be alternating rows to the left and right, so please follow the volunteers sitting at the ends of your rows when you see them there.
Professional photographers will take a photo of each candidate after you have left the stage. And so for the safety of our graduates and of other guests, please do remain seated during this time in the ceremony. So thank you very much. And so will the first set of candidates please rise.
[SIDE CONVERSATION]
[READING NAMES]
[APPLAUSE]
KATHRYN BOOR: I think we should do that one more time. Congratulations to our new doctors.
[APPLAUSE]
Wonderful, I knew I could count on this crowd for enthusiasm. And now it is my honor to introduce Cornell University's 14th president and Professor of Computer Science, Information, Science and Linguistics. Martha E. Pollack, President Pollack.
MARTHA E. POLLACK: Thank you, Dean Boor, and congratulations, again, to all of our new PhDs and a special congratulations to all of the families and friends who are with you here today and who have been with you throughout this journey, who listened to you and supported you throughout your undergraduate degrees, your graduate coursework, your A exams, and that intellectual marathon that is writing a dissertation.
The topic of my own dissertation, 38 years ago, was Inferring Domain Plans and Question Answering. My area of computer science is artificial intelligence, specifically natural language processing. And my doctoral research was on how to infer underlying plans and intentions from natural language text within the context of a question answering system.
But my parents just told people she's doing her dissertation on computer science. In 1986, nobody knew what artificial intelligence was. Today, each of you is the world's expert in one particular area of human knowledge. And whatever the area is that you've chosen for your dissertation, you know more about that topic than anyone else in the world.
Whether it's reclaiming labor for agroecological futures in Malawi, computational methods for proactively supporting healthier online discussions, or and this is real, epitaxial growth, magnetic and electric properties, and spin transport in room temperature multiferroic bismuth-ferrite thin films and study of room temperature by stability of antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic phases in iron rhodium thin films.
[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE]
Or as his parents probably explained it to their friends, physics.
[LAUGHTER]
The knowledge brought to light by your research and shared with the world through your dissertation is now your own contribution to the edifice of human knowledge. Just as your research built on the knowledge discovered and created by others, so will those who come after you build on yours.
And in recognition of that contribution, tomorrow, when we formally grant your degrees at commencement, we will be welcoming you to the ancient and universal company of scholars. To earn a PhD is to formally join that company and with it, a culture that spans not just disciplines and institutions, but continents and centuries. It speaks a shared language of evidence and truth, exploration and creation, integrity and excellence.
Its members are united in the pursuit of new knowledge and equally in the commitment to sharing it. It is a culture that, whatever the field, exists for a common purpose arriving at a deeper and fuller understanding of the world and everything in it. A culture of discussion and debate, differences and disagreements are necessary and vital where they exist to serve that common purpose, where you can argue or argue vigorously over a difference of opinion in a conference Q&A session and continue that argument with your colleagues over dinner.
Whatever career you choose to pursue, whether within the Academy or beyond it, I ask you to bring that culture of collegial debate, of shared commitment to purposeful discovery, along with you. And I also have one other request, whether it's in a classroom or a lab or a research organization or somewhere else, all of you, sooner or later, are likely to be in a position of authority.
I want to ask you, as you leave this stage of your life behind you and move on to the next one, to reflect on the people who have helped you to get where you are now and the kindness and the support that you have received. Remember the role that that kindness has played in bringing you to this point and bring that kindness with you to share with others as you go forward from here. New doctors, congratulations to you all.
[APPLAUSE]
KATHRYN BOOR: Powerful and very important words. Thank you, President Pollack. One more time, please join me in congratulating our newest recipients of the PhD degree from Cornell University. Congratulations, new doctors.
[APPLAUSE]
It gives me great joy to be here with you on this day, to celebrate all that you have accomplished. In addition to celebrating, today is also a day for reflection, an opportunity to reflect on the people who have supported you along the way and to thank the loved ones who are here with you today.
But for those people who are on your mind, but who couldn't be here with us today, we have provided gratitude, post cards in the reception area for you to send to them. So please take some home and address them and mail them or address them and give them to us, and we will mail them for you. So for the folks who you wish were here and you want to know that you've had this marvelous day, please do send them a gratitude postcard.
Graduates, newly anointed doctors, keep Cornell in your hearts as you go out into the world and as you forge new paths for yourselves. Add more pages to the atlas of knowledge in the way that only you can. And please stay in touch. And now I would like to invite everyone to stand and join us in singing your Alma Mater.
["FAR ABOVE CAYUGA'S WATERS"]
(SINGING) Far above Cayuga's waters
With its waves of blue
Stands our noble Alma Mater
Glorious to view
Lift the chorus
Speed it onward
Loud her praises tell
Hail to thee our Alma Mater
Hail, all hail, Cornell.
Far above the busy humming
Of the bustling town
Reared against the arch of heaven
Looks she proudly down
Lift the chorus
Speed it onward
Loud her praises tell
Hail to thee our Alma Mater
Hail, all hail, Cornell
[APPLAUSE]
KATHRYN BOOR: This concludes our ceremony this evening. Please do remain standing while the platform party and our candidates recess. Everyone is welcome to join the reception and thank you all for attending.
["STRIKE UP A SONG TO CORNELL"] Strike up a song to Cornell
And let the swelling chorus
Rise before us
Strike up a song to Cornell
And set the campus ringing
With our singing
Fill the glasses with a song
And drink the magic music spell
We will sound the joy of life intense
In a rousing toast to Cornell
Strike up a song to Cornell
And let the swelling chorus
Rise before us
Strike up a song to Cornell
And set the campus ringing
With our singing
Fill the glasses with a song
And drink the magic music spell
We will sound the joy of life intense
In a rousing toast to Cornell
Strike up a song to Cornell
Come let us strike up a song to Cornell
Strike up a song to Cornell
Strike up a song to Cornell
And let the swelling chorus
Rise before us.
Strike up a song to Cornell
And set the campus ringing
With our singing
Fill the glasses with a song
And bring the magic music spell
We will sound the joy of life intense
In a rousing toast to Cornell
Strike up a song to Cornell
And let the swelling chorus
Rise before us
Strike up a song to Cornell
And set the campus ringing
With our singing
Fill all the classes with a song
And drink the magic music spell
We will sound the joy of life intense
In a rousing toast to Cornell
Strike up a song to Cornell
Come let us strike up a song to Cornell
Strike up a song to Cornell
Strike up a song to Cornell
And let the swelling chorus
Rise before us
Strike up a song to Cornell
And set the campus ringing
With our singing
Fill the glasses with a song
And bring the magic music spell
We will sound the joy of life intense
In a rousing toast to Cornell
Strike up a song to Cornell
And let the swelling chorus
Rise before us
Strike up a song to Cornell
And set the campus ringing
With our singing
Fill the glasses with a song
And drink the magic music spell
We will sound the joy of life intense
In a rousing toast to Cornell
Strike up a song to Cornell
Come let us strike up a song to Cornell
Strike up a song to Cornell
