A Nobel Prize winner in chemistry and a world-renowned sculptor are among the six people selected to receive honorary degrees during Washington University's 139th Commencement May 19. The University also will bestow academic degrees on some 2,500 students during the ceremony, which begins at 8:30 a.m. in Brookings Quadrangle.
Julian Bond, one of the nation's most respected civil rights leaders, will deliver the Commencement address and receive an honorary doctor of laws degree.
The others receiving honorary degrees are Michael M. Karl, M.D., a member of the Washington University School of Medicine faculty for more than 50 years; Yuan T. Lee, the 1986 Nobel laureate in chemistry and president of Taiwan's highest government-sponsored academic research institution; Lee M. Liberman, chairman emeritus of Laclede Gas Co. and a revered St. Louis community leader; Mary Miss, a world-renowned sculptor and installation artist; and Alvin J. Siteman, chairman and president of both Site Oil Co. of Missouri and Flash Oil Corp. and president and chief executive officer of the Siteman Organization.
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Known for raising hard questions and proposing innovative solutions, Julian Bond has been on the cutting edge of social change for 40 years as an activist who faced jail for his convictions, as a member of the Georgia General Assembly for more than 20 years, as a university professor and as a nationally known writer and lecturer.
Since 1998, Bond has been chairman of the board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization. He also is a distinguished scholar in residence at American University, Washington, D.C., and a professor of his-tory at the University of Virginia.
Bond graduated from the George School, a Quaker school in Bucks County, Pa., in 1957 and entered Morehouse College in Atlanta that same year. He left Morehouse one semester short of graduation in 1961 to join the staff of a new protest newspaper, The Atlanta Inquirer, later becoming the paper's managing editor. He returned to More-house in 1971, earning a bachelor of arts degree in English.
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Michael M. Karl, M.D., has practiced medicine in St. Louis for more than 50 years. He joined the faculty of the medical school in 1940 and was named a professor in 1972.
After undergraduate work at the University of Wisconsin and a medical degree from the University of Louisville, Karl came to St. Louis for an internship and residency at St. Louis City Hospital. In the midst of that training, he also did a fellowship in cardiology at the medical school. He has been there in one capacity or another ever since, except for his years of military service in the South Pacific during World War II.
A professor of clinical medicine, Karl went into private practice and started the West End's Maryland Medical Group in 1946, continuing in that practice until 1987. Throughout those years, he maintained close ties to the medical school, Barnes Hospital and the Jewish Hospital of St. Louis.
Karl and his wife, Irene E. Karl, Ph.D., research professor of medicine, were the first husband-and-wife team to have an endowed professorship established in their honor at the medical school.
Karl will receive a doctor of science degree.
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Yuan T. Lee, Ph.D., the 1986 Nobel laureate in chemistry, began his academic career in his native Taiwan and continues it there today as president of Academia Sinica, the highest government-sponsored academic research institution in Taiwan, Republic of China. Lee also has made a lasting impact on American higher education at various prestigious institutions, and he has made seminal, far-reaching advancements in chemical reaction dynamics.
Lee received a bachelor of science degree in chemistry in 1959 from the National Taiwan University and a master's degree in 1961 from National Tsinghua University in Taiwan. He pursued doctoral research at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a doctorate in 1965 and began conducting reactive scattering experiments in ion-molecule reactions as a post-doctoral fellow.
In 1967, Lee joined a research group at Harvard, where he constructed a universal crossed molecular beam apparatus. After being appointed assistant professor at the University of Chicago in 1968, he rapidly made his laboratory the North American capital of molecular beam study. He returned to Berkeley in 1974 as a full professor and significantly expanded his research over the next 20 years.
Lee will receive a doctor of science degree.
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Lee M. Liberman, chairman emeritus of Laclede Gas Co., is revered in St. Louis as a civic leader and a champion of community causes. He is a treasured member of the Washington University community as well -- as a life trustee, as a former chairman and vice chairman of the Board of Trustees and, currently, as a student. He is a Ph.D. candidate in American literature and history in University College in Arts & Sciences and received a master of liberal arts degree, also from University College, in 1994.
Liberman started his career at Laclede as an engineer in 1945, after graduating from Yale University with a degree in chemical engineering and serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps.
Described by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as a "corporate executive with a Boy Scout heart," he has served in countless ways to make St. Louis a better place. Indeed, in 1976, the St. Louis Area Chapter of the Boy Scouts of America conferred on him its Distinguished Eagle Award.
At the University, Liberman has been a trustee since 1975 and has served on many board committees. As chairman of the Development Committee since 1987, he has given extraordinary leadership to the University's fund-raising efforts. He is vice chairman of the capital resources division of the current $1 billion Campaign for Washington University.
Liberman will receive a doctor of humanities degree.
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Mary Miss is a world-renowned sculptor and installation artist whose often grand-scaled projects combine cultural and historical insights with a sharp awareness of architectural and urban planning issues.
Since the mid-1960s, Miss has created dozens of commissions that seek to promote a dialogue between public and private spaces as well as between natural and urban landscapes. Acutely aware of the responsibilities that accompany any major environmental project, Miss actively seeks community involvement while planning a work, and she encourages the public to interact with the final result.
Born in New York City in 1944, Miss received a bachelor of arts degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1966 and a master of fine arts degree from the Maryland Art Institute's Rinehart School of Sculpture in 1968. That same year, she created her first public projects -- a pair of installations in Colorado Springs, Colo., -- and would quickly find commissions in New York, New Jersey, Ohio and Connecticut. Since then, she has gone on to create works for public and private institutions across the United States and Europe.
Miss will receive a doctor of fine arts degree.
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Alvin J. Siteman is chairman and president of both Site Oil Co. of Missouri and Flash Oil Corp. and president and CEO of the Siteman Organization, a major real estate developer, property manager and leasing agent. He received a bachelor of science degree in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1948.
Throughout the St. Louis area, Siteman is known and respected for his expertise in many arenas, including his keen interest in and support of the arts. He is a current trustee and immediate past president of the Saint Louis Art Museum's Board of Commissioners, and he is an advisory board member of Laumeier Sculpture Park, which he helped found. For 10 years, he was chairman of the board of Mark Twain Bancshares, and for two years of Mercantile Bank of St. Louis after the two merged in 1997.
A major supporter of the University, Siteman and his wife, Ruth Levinsohn Siteman, who received a bachelor's degree from University College in Arts & Sciences in 1975, recently committed $35 million to further the development of a major cancer center under the direction of the University's medical school and Barnes-Jewish Hospital. In recognition of the Sitemans' gift, the institutions' combined cancer programs have been named The Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center.
Siteman will receive a doctor of humanities degree.
