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Memorial Sloan-Kettering President Harold Varmus; Convocation keynote speaker Freeman Hrabowski; and Chairman of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Boards of Overseers and Managers Douglas Warner |
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Memorial Sloan-Kettering's 30th annual Academic Convocation featured a stirring address by Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, President of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and honored students receiving PhD degrees for work conducted in Memorial Sloan-Kettering's laboratories; younger Memorial Sloan-Kettering physicians, scientists, and postdoctoral research fellows; and established clinicians and investigators from the Center and beyond.
"Many things go into the success of an institution like ours," observed Memorial Sloan-Kettering President Harold Varmus in his opening remarks at the Center's 2009 Convocation on May 14. "They almost all fall under the rubric of delivery of care to patients with cancer, research to make cancer a more manageable disease in the future, or the training of people to care for patients with the disease and make further research gains." "Today," Dr. Varmus continued, "you'll hear particular emphasis on the
Keynote speaker Dr. Hrabowski electrified the audience, gathered in the Rockefeller Research Laboratories Auditorium, telling stories of his coming-of-age in segregated 1960s Birmingham, Alabama, and how his childhood experiences led him to "ask what I could do to have more people of color excited about math and science, and how I could convince the world that people could come from any background and become the best." He reminded the graduates that "it takes researchers to produce researchers. . . . My challenge to you is to think about how you can, in the midst of doing your own research, pull in other people — more women, more people of color, more people from low-income backgrounds -- and get them excited about asking the good questions, using the knowledge that they have. It can make all the difference . . ."
