Do people still do this?/Why do they get to be happy?

Okay, there may not be anything particularly sassy about the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences choices of graduation speakers, but they’re pretty awesome nonetheless. Klaus Lackner, a professor in GeoPhysics here at Columbia, will probably talk about how the world is exploding and it’s all our fault, but he’ll probably also sprinkle in some stuff on what we can and are doing to stop that. Duncan J. Watts will also be speaking on his experiences, including those as a researcher for Microsoft and a founding member of the Microsoft Research-NYC lab. All this is going down on Sunday, May 18, and the full announcement is below:

Klaus Lackner and Duncan Watts to Speak at GSAS Convocation Ceremonies

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Columbia University (GSAS) is pleased to announce that Klaus Lackner and Duncan J. Watts will speak at the 2014 GSAS Ph.D. and Master’s Convocation ceremonies, respectively. The ceremonies will take place on Sunday, May 18.

Klaus Lackner is the Ewing and J. Lamar Worzel Professor of Geophysics at Columbia, and also Director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at the Earth Institute. From 2006 to 2012 he served as Chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering. Prof. Lackner’s current research interests include carbon capture and sequestration, air capture, energy systems and scaling properties (including synthetic fuels and wind energy), energy and environmental policy, lifecycle analysis, and zero-emission modeling for coal and cement plants.

Prior to joining Columbia in 2001, Lackner worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he was involved in hydrodynamics and fusion-related research. He was instrumental in forming the Zero Emission Coal Alliance and was a lead author in the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report on Carbon Capture and Storage. He received the Weapons Recognition of Excellence Award in 1991 and the National Laboratory Consortium Award for Technology in 2001 .

Duncan J. Watts is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and a founding member of the Microsoft Research-NYC lab. From 2000-2007, he was a professor of sociology at Columbia, and then, prior to joining Microsoft, a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, where he directed the Human Social Dynamics group. He has also served on the external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute and as a visiting fellow at Columbia and Oxford.

Watts’ research on social networks and collective dynamics has appeared in a wide range of journals, including Nature, Science, Physical Review Letters, and American Journal of Sociology. He is also the author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness, and Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer.

For more information about the GSAS Convocation Ceremonies, contact Robert Ast at rast@columbia.edu or (212) 851-9851.

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