WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., April 11, 2007 - Williams College will celebrate its 218th Commencement on June 2-3, 2007.

News anchor Katie Couric will deliver the college's Commencement address on Sunday, June 3. Sri Lanka Supreme Court Justice Shiranee Tilakawardane will deliver the Baccalaureate address on Saturday, June 2.

In addition to Ms. Couric and Ms. Tilakawardane, the honorary degree candidates are educator Douglas J. Bennet, economist Robert Engle, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and biologist Edward O. Wilson.

DOUGLAS J. BENNET

Douglas Bennet has served since 1995 as president of Wesleyan University and will retire this year. Before being tapped for the presidency of Wesleyan, he was assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, appointed to the post in 1993 by President Clinton to streamline and improve relations with the United Nations and other external organizations.

Bennet is also known for his decade (1983-93) as chief executive officer and president of National Public Radio. He was recruited to orchestrate a dramatic turnaround at the near-bankrupt organization. He succeeded in tripling listenership and almost doubling the number of member stations while raising funds to end its near total dependency on federal money. He spurred innovative programming that produced popular shows such as Weekend Edition, Afro-Pop, and Performance Today.

Bennet also served as head of the Agency for International Development (1979-81), where he managed an annual budget of $5 billion in U.S. economic assistance to 70 developing nations.

Bennet left government service in 1981 to become the first president of the Roosevelt Center for American Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., a private think tank specializing in issues of defense policy and disarmament.

He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation National Advisory committee, and the advisory council of The Stanley Foundation.

Born in Orange, N.J., he grew up in Lyme, Conn. He received a B.A. from Wesleyan in 1959, an M.A. in history from the University of California, Berkeley in 1960, and a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 1968.

KATIE COURIC

Katie Couric is anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News. The first woman to anchor solely a network evening newscast, she is also a 60 Minutes correspondent and the anchor of CBS News prime time specials.

She joined CBS News in 1989 as deputy Pentagon reporter and was appointed the network's first national correspondent in 1990. A year later, she became an anchor of the NBC Today Show, for which she continued to work until moving to CBS in 2006. Couric is the third permanent anchor of the CBS Evening News, after Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather.

She has covered most of the major breaking news events during the past 15 years, including the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the Columbine tragedy, and the Oklahoma City bombing. She has also become known for her interviews with major newsmakers in politics, business, and culture.

Following the death of her husband to colon cancer in 1998, she co-founded a non-profit organization for cancer research and education and became the most prominent spokeswoman for gastrointestinal cancer awareness. Following her on-air colonoscopy in 2000, a scientifically documented 20 percent increase was noted in the number of colonoscopies performed across the country. Researchers dubbed this "The Couric Effect." She has helped raise almost $27 million to fight colorectal and other GI cancers.

Couric is the recipient of major prizes in appreciation of her efforts to encourage and generate funds for public health, as well as for her professionalism in the news business. She has won six Emmy Awards, an Associated Press Award, the National Headliner Award, and American Women in Radio and Television Gracie Award, among many others.

Born in Arlington, Va., Couric graduated with honors from the University of Virginia with a bachelor's degree in English and a focus on American studies.

ROBERT ENGLE

Robert Engle was born in Syracuse, N.Y., and brought up in Media, Penn. He received his B.A. from Williams, majoring in physics. During his senior year, persuaded by his friends, he decided to take Introduction to Economics as an elective.

After graduating from Williams, he received his M.S. in physics and Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University. Awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Economics, Engle is an expert in time series analysis with a longstanding interest in the analysis of financial markets. His model and its generalizations have become indispensable tools not only for researchers, but also for analysts of financial markets, who use them in asset pricing and in evaluating portfolio risk.

His interest in financial econometrics covers equities, interest rates, exchange rates, and option pricing. He is currently developing methods to analyze large systems of assets, real-time volatility, market microstructure, and extreme market movements.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science.

Before joining NYU in 2000, Engle was Chancellor's Associates Professor and economics department chair at the University of California, San Diego, and an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Engle is the author of more than 100 academic papers and articles and four books, the most recent of which is "Econometric Analysis of Financial and Economic Time Series, 'Good Ideas'."

SHIRANEE TILAKAWARDANE

A Supreme Court judge in the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, Tilakawardane is known as a "peace-builder."

"The globalization of the law creates a language of peace," she said. "… a charter of human rights that guarantees to all the freedoms of speech and equality. I believe that if we talk this language of global equality, we will have justice."

Tilakawardane was her country's first woman court of appeal judge, president of the court of appeal, high court judge, admiralty court judge, and state counsel to the attorney general's department.

Her dedicated efforts in the fields of equality and justice, gender education, and child rights in Sri Lanka and the international community have earned her international renown.

She drafted the guidelines for child victim and child witness testimony submitted to the U.N. for adoption at the International Criminal Court, in addition to many other writings and presentations on child abuse and child witnesses for organizations including the International Bureau of Child Rights and the Child Protection Authority.

She is a member of the advisory board of the South Asian Regional Program on Equity to reduce trafficking and violence against women in South Asia and is an advisory committee member and international panelist for human rights and equality on the Asia Pacific Forum for Judges. She was a member of a distinguished Harvard panel in 2004 to explore women's roles in peace, addressing the question, "Can Women Stop War?"

She has been active in Sakshi of India's gender workshops for judges and the Asia Pacific Forum for Gender Education for Judges and serves on the International Panel of Judges for the Child Rights Bureau.

Her son, Suranjit, is a senior at Williams College.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON

The youngest director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, Neil deGrasse Tyson was born in New York City in 1958, the same year that NASA was founded. He said his interest in science and space exploration was sparked during his first visit to the Old Hayden Planetarium.

Tyson attended the Bronx High School of Science and went on to receive his B.A. in physics from Harvard University. He received his master's degree from the University of Texas, focusing on star formation models for the dwarf galaxies, and his Ph.D. in astrophysics from Columbia University in 1991.

After earning his doctorate, Tyson worked as an astrophysicist and research scientist at Princeton University, as a columnist for Stardate magazine, and since 1996 as the first occupant of the Frederick P. Rose Directorship of the planetarium.

Convinced that science is entertaining and bent on making it accessible to the public, he has delivered hundreds of public lectures to educators, community groups, school groups, universities, and amateur astronomy associations.

His professional research interests are broad and include star formation, exploding stars, dwarf galaxies, and the structure of the Milky Way.

Tyson is the author of "One Universe: At Home in the Cosmos," winner of the 2001 American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award. In addition to dozens of professional publications, he writes a monthly essay for Natural History Magazine. He is a reviewer and commentator for Nature and the Astrophysical Journal and his writings have appeared in The New York Times and Scientific American, among others. His latest book, "Death by Black Hole" is a New York Times best selling collection of his favorite essays.

In 2004, he was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the organization, for his exemplary service on the President's Commission on Implementation of U.S. Exploration Policy.

EDWARD O. WILSON

Wilson was born in Birmingham, Ala. After earning a B.S. and M.S. in biology at the University of Alabama, he entered the graduate program of the University of Tennessee, and then transferred to Harvard University, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1955. In 1956, he joined the Harvard faculty, where he is now Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus and Honorary Curator in Entomology.

Hailed as "the new Darwin" of modern science, Wilson's contributions include, in 1963, the creation of the theory of island biogeography, with Robert H. MacArthur, a work that greatly influenced the discipline of ecology and became a cornerstone of conservation biology; the decoding of chemical communication of ants; and, with W.H. Bossert, the first general theory of pheromone molecular evolution (1963). The pheromone research and Wilson's first accounts of caste evolution and ergonomic optimization (1953, 1968) were among the foundations of the new discipline of sociobiology.

Over the years, Wilson has become more engaged in the science activism of biodiversity conservation. In 1995 he was named one of the 25 most influential Americans by Time Magazine, and in 2000 one of the century's 100 leading environmentalists by both Time and Audubon Magazines.

He has received more than 100 awards, including the National Medal of Science, two Pulitzer Prizes for Non-fiction, Japan's International Prize for Biology, the Prix de l'Institut de Vie, Paris, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, the Gold Medal of the Worldwide Fund for Nature, the Audubon Medal of the Audubon Society, and Saudi Arabia's King Faisal International Prize for Science.

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