Brown University’s three-day Commencement/Reunion Weekend begins Friday, May 24, and concludes with the 245th Commencement exercises Sunday afternoon. See also individual news releases: Baccalaureate address | Senior orators | Six honorary doctorates | Statistics | Alpert Medical School | Graduate School | Joukowsky Dissertations

Due to the likelihood of inclement weather and heavy rain Saturday, Brown University has canceled the procession from campus to the Meeting House of the First Baptist Church in America. The Baccalaureate Service itself will be held at its scheduled time — 2:30 p.m. — in the Meeting House. All Commencement activities scheduled for Sunday, May 26, will be held as planned.

At its regular Commencement Weekend meeting, the Corporation of Brown University elected two new fellows and ten new trustees to its ranks. The Corporation also accepted gifts totaling more than $38 million, advanced 13 faculty members to named chairs, and, at an earlier session, discussed issues related to coal divestment.

Sheila Dixon traveled a long way to the top of College Hill. She will walk through the Van Wickle Gates at the top of her game: A Brown degree (A.B., political science), All-Ivy basketball honors, and options she wasn’t always expecting to have.

What kind of schools should educational reforms produce? Alison Rutsch, who will receive degrees from Brown and RISD, put the question to the customers — the schoolchildren themselves. The kids expressed themselves as clearly as they could: They drew pictures. Rutsch ‘listened’ to what they had to say.

Jessica Heney, who graduates May 26 from the Alpert Medical School, will continue as a family medicine resident at Memorial Hospital in Pawtucket the work she has been doing for years: treating the ailment of societal inequity.

In particle physics, not finding a particle can narrow the search and guide new theories. Michael Luk’s Joukowsky Prize-winning dissertation, The Search for a Heavy Top-Like Quark, describes the most comprehensive search ever carried out for a particle that could answer puzzling questions about the nature of the Higgs boson.

Susan H. Ellison, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology, has won a Joukowsky Dissertation Prize in Social Science for Mediating Democracy in El Alto: The Politics of Conflict Resolution in Bolivia. She spent 17 months in Bolivia studying Alternative Dispute Resolution and other programs meant to encourage development of democracy.

Jennifer R. Davis’ Joukowsky Award-winning dissertation explaining how certain bacteria can turn plant matter into the precursors of biofuels was a novel project in Jason Sello’s chemistry lab. It is also a tour (de force) of genomics, bioinformatics, biochemistry, and structural biology that has made a promising scientist even more broadly skilled.

Benjamin Teitelbaum spent almost two years interviewing and getting to know members of the Swedish nationalist movement, sometimes finding himself in scary situations in his quest to understand the subculture's use of music. It was that perseverance in part that won him the 2013 Joukowsky Family Foundation Outstanding Dissertation Award in the Humanities for his study “Come Hear Our Merry Song:” Shifts in the Sound of Contemporary Swedish Radical Nationalism.