Dec. 7, 2005
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Teresa Hendrix
(805) 756-7266
Cal Poly Mid-Year Commencement Set for Saturday
SAN LUIS OBISPO -- Some 1,067 students will graduate in three ceremonies Saturday in Cal Poly’s annual Fall Commencement.
Students from the Orfalea College of Business and College of Engineering
will graduate in a
9 a.m. ceremony. Students from the College of Liberal Arts and College
of Architecture and Environmental Design will graduate in a 1 p.m.
ceremony. And students from the College of Agriculture, College
of Education, and College of Science and Mathematics will graduate
in the last ceremony of the afternoon, at 3:30 p.m. All ceremonies
will be held in the Cal Poly ASI Recreation Center.
The keynote speaker at the 9 a.m. commencement ceremony will be Blake Irving, vice president of the MSN Communication Services and Member Platform group at Microsoft. Irving is responsible for driving and managing Microsoft’s Internet communications services. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from San Diego State University and his master’s degree in business administration from Pepperdine University.
In January 2004, Irving became a member of the Cal Poly President’s Cabinet, a senior advisory group of state and national leaders in business, industry, government and the community. He is also a member of the College of Engineering’s Women’s Engineering Program Advisory Committee.
The keynote speaker at the 1 p.m. ceremony is Roger Ynostroza, the editorial director of Graphic Arts Monthly, the leading applied technology magazine serving the U.S. commercial printing industry. In 1971, after earning a Bachelor of Science degree in printing technology management at Cal Poly, he joined Graphic Arts Monthly in Chicago, then moved to New York in 1979 when the magazine relocated there; he was appointed editor in chief in 1982.
His formal education in journalism was supplemented by work on college publications and by military duty as a Marine Corps combat correspondent in Vietnam. In 1987, Ynostroza was recognized as the Honored Alumnus from the Cal Poly College of Liberal Arts.
The keynote speaker at the 3:30 p.m. ceremony is Bill Linton. Linton founded Promega Corporation in Madison, Wisc., in 1978. Since then, he has served as president and CEO, director, and chairman of the board. The privately held company has revenues of over $175 million; it develops and supplies advanced biological and instrumentation systems for life science research and related applications worldwide.
Through Promega, Linton established the BioPharmaceutical Technology Center Institute in 1993, a non-profit education, science, and cultural institute. He also established the Woods Hollow Children’s Center in 1991, providing infant through school-age childcare for the local community and Promega employees.
Linton received a B.S. with honors in biological sciences from the UC Berkeley in 1970, and in 2004 received an honorary doctorate in philosophy in bioscience degree from Hannam University in Taejon, Korea, in recognition of his global support for the advancement of technology and support of education in the life sciences.
- # # # -