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When University of Colorado at Boulder School of Law Registrar Barbara Leggate takes the stage during the school's commencement ceremony, it won't be as a marshal, something she has done for the past 25 years. Instead, Leggate, who will be retiring this year and has the school's Humanitarian Award named after her, will be recognized for her years of service with a Lifetime Humanitarian Award.

Jessica Sucherman, a senior in the Undergraduate Academy, an intellectual community of academically motivated students, has been named recipient of the Karen Raforth Scholarship. The scholarship is administered by the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies Certificate Program and provides a financial award to a graduate or undergraduate student at CU-Boulder who best exemplifies steadfastness, visibility and effectiveness in the quest for gay rights and the rights of all marginalized people.

The Sewall Residential Academic Program, in which every student living in that CU-Boulder residence hall takes classes in the same area of study, will change its focus from American Studies to the American West during the 2002-03 academic year, program director and history Professor William Wei has announced. "We will spend the next year making the transition from the theme of American Studies to the theme of the American West," Wei said.

Matt Brown, a doctoral candidate in sociology, has been named recipient of the first annual $1,000 scholarship sponsored by the University of Colorado at Boulder's Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay and Transgender Alumni Association.

Nobel laureate and University of Colorado at Boulder Distinguished Professor Carl Wieman will give the commencement address at the spring ceremony on Friday, May 10, at 9:30 a.m. in Folsom Stadium. Wieman, with Senior Scientist Eric Cornell of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, received the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for their landmark 1995 creation of the world's first Bose-Einstein condensate, a new form of matter created by cooling atoms to a few hundred billionths of a degree above absolute zero.

University of Colorado at Boulder engineering doctoral students Chris Brotherton and Michael Raulli are the first recipients of the Sandia Doctoral Fellowship, a new fellowship supporting research in micro and nano systems established at CU-Boulder.

A University of Colorado Leeds School of Business MBA student will spend one year as a volunteer business consultant in Tajikistan as part of the MBA Enterprise Corps. Jay Behringer will join the Pragma Corporation's Small and Medium Enterprise Development Project, a venture designed to assist small- and medium-sized companies in Tajikistan with marketing and business plans, trade opportunities and management practices.

Boulder researchers at the University of Colorado and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration anticipate an emerging El Niño event may reduce the severity of drought conditions in the Southwest United States this summer. The announcement was made this week by researchers at the Climate Diagnostics Center, run jointly by CU-Boulder and NOAA through the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. CIRES is headquartered on the CU-Boulder campus.

Special recognition ceremonies will be hosted by most University of Colorado at Boulder schools and colleges in addition to the main university commencement ceremony on Friday, May 10, at 9:30 a.m. in Folsom Stadium. Following is a schedule of special events in the schools and colleges to honor the graduates and their families and guests.

Students at the University of Colorado at Boulder will have a wider choice of courses this summer featuring guest faculty from universities around the world. The Faculty-In-Residence-Summer-Term, or FIRST program, starts on May 13 and will continue throughout the summer. The 12 initial faculty members come from New Zealand, Sweden and France, in addition to the United States.