Spring graduation speakers announced

Timothy Shriver, chairman and chief executive officer of Special Olympics, will deliver the commencement address to more than 2,500 students in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences during graduation ceremonies May 10.

Shriver, who earned his doctorate in special education from UConn in 1997, also will receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree during the dual ceremonies in the Harry A. Gampel Pavilion, at 12:30 and 4:30 p.m.

On May 9, Robert Sternberg, dean of the Tufts University School of Arts and Sciences and an internationally recognized scholar and professor in the fields of psychology, education, and management, will deliver the commencement address to more than 1,700 graduate students. The ceremony begins at 1 p.m. in Gampel Pavilion. Sternberg will also receive an honorary Doctor of Science degree; and this year’s Board of Trustees Distinguished Professors will be recognized.

Overall, including the schools of law, medicine, and dental medicine, nearly 7,000 UConn students will receive degrees during ceremonies on May 9 and 10 in Storrs and May 17 in Hartford. Similar to last year, each school and college will host a ceremony for its graduating seniors, with its own speaker.

The CLAS ceremony, with 2,540 students eligible for graduation, is by far the largest of the schools. Its speaker, Shriver, has led Special Olympics for 11 years. During that period, he has helped the movement grow to include more than 2.5 million athletes and their families in more than 180 countries.

He also created Special Olympics Healthy Athletes, the world’s largest public health screening and education program for people with intellectual disabilities.

After earning his doctorate at UConn Shriver created the New Haven public schools’ Social Development Project, and co-founded the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning, the leading research organization in the country in the field of social and emotional learning. He currently chairs the collaborative.

Sternberg, the graduate school speaker, was formerly IBM Professor of Psychology and Education in the Department of Psychology at Yale. He is also a past president of the American Psychological Association.

On May 17 at 10:30 a.m., nearly 300 students who will be eligible to receive Juris Doctor or Master of Laws degrees will be addressed by Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. since 2006. Bair was previously Dean’s Professor of Financial Regulatory Policy at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass-Amherst. She has also held senior positions at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the New York Stock Exchange, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

At 2 p.m. on May 17, more than 100 students will be awarded medical or dental degrees during ceremonies at the Connecticut Convention Center. They will be addressed by Keith Batchelder, founder and chief executive officer of Genomic Healthcare Strategies, a company specializing in the changes in healthcare resulting from advances in molecular medicine.