Southern Arkansas University is scheduled to recognize 370 graduate students and 171 undergraduates during two Fall Commencement ceremonies at 5 and 7:30 p.m. on Friday, December 8, 2017.
Both ceremonies will take place in the gymnasium at the W.T. Watson Athletic Center. The 5 p.m. graduation will include all undergraduate honorees, candidates for associates and bachelor’s degrees, from SAU’s four colleges. The 7:30 p.m. ceremony will feature students earning master’s degrees from SAU’s School of Graduate Studies.
All candidates for graduation should assemble in the Auxiliary Gym of the W.T. Watson Athletic Center no later than one hour before their ceremony start time. For more information about graduation, visit http://web.saumag.edu/registrar.
SAU 2017 Honor Professor Dr. Abdel Bachri will provide both commencement addresses. He currently serves as associate professor of physics, interim dean of the College of Science and Engineering, and the chair of the Department of Engineering and Physics. His favorite activity with students is probing Earth’s stratosphere via high altitude scientific ballooning. He has led students on a number of ballooning experiments funded by NASA and has flown several payloads for various reasons, from measuring radiation and other atmospheric parameters at high altitude to flying spore-forming bacteria isolated from spacecraft assembly clean-rooms, to help understand the nature of extremophilic bacteria in the context of microbial life on Mars or other extreme environments.
Dr. Bachri completed his BS and MS degrees from the University of Hassan II, Casablanca, Morocco, where he majored in physics. He also received a Master in High Energy Physics from the International Center of Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, and a PhD in Theoretical Particle Physics from Oklahoma State University. He joined Southern Arkansas University in 2007.
