University at Albany Professor John Delano, a nationally known geochemist who is working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to investigate the origins of life, will be the featured speaker at UAlbany’s 156th undergraduate commencement ceremony. The event will be Sunday, May 21, at 10 a.m., at the Pepsi Arena in downtown Albany.
    This year, the University will award 2,472 undergraduate degrees, 1,361 master’s degrees and 219 doctoral degrees. The Senior Class Gift is the establishment of a scholarship fund, for which more than $18,000 has been collected, to be presented during the ceremony by Senior Class President David Bender.
     Shirley Downey, director of the Career Development Center, said, “The growing economy and low unemployment rate make it an incredible year for students entering the workforce. Overall the college labor market will expand by 11-15 percent from last year, which was a very good year. Many University at Albany students had secured jobs by the end of the fall semester. The toughest choice for some students was trying to decide between the multiple job offers they received.”
    One of a handful of scientists leading the nation in trying to answer some of the most basic questions about the universe, Delano has worked with NASA in various capacities since 1979. He is currently associate director of its Center for Studies on the Origins of Life as well as principal investigator of the Exobiology Program. His commencement address will be highlighted by a slide show.
    Delano has been a faculty member at UAlbany since 1982. He served as chair of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences from 1996-99. Among his many honors, he received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. Prior to coming to Albany, Delano had positions at SUNY Stony Brook, Australian National University, and he served as a co-investigator for the Planetary Materials and Geochemistry Program for NASA.
    Delano received his Ph.D. in geochemistry from SUNY Stony Brook.
    The University’s graduate commencement will begin at 2:30 p.m. May 21 at the Recreation and Convocation Center on the main campus. Julian Zelizer, an associate professor of both history and public policy, will be the keynote speaker. He has been on the faculty at UAlbany since 1996. An expert on American history, he is author of the well-received book, Taxing America: Wilbur D. Mills, Congress and the State, 1945-1975. He has recently won a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend Award for his book project, Making Democracy Work? Congressional Reform, 1945-2000. He earned both his master’s and doctoral degrees from Johns Hopkins University.

    Sociologist Richard D. Alba has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study second generations in immigration societies, for the academic year beginning in September.
The prestigious one-year fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation carries a stipend of $34,000.
     Glenna Spitze, chair of the Department of Sociology, said, “We are extremely proud of our colleague, Richard Alba, who is one of only two sociologists in the country to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship for the coming year, as well as being vice president-elect of the American Sociological Association. He has a distinguished international reputation for his work on race/ethnicity and migration.”
     Alba said, “Half of the year I will be associate research director at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, where I will be working with Dr. Roxanne Silberman, who does work on the children of immigrants in France.” Alba joined the faculty of the Department of Sociology in 1980. In 1981 he became founding director of the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis, and in 1985, he was named a professor in the Department of Public Affairs and Policy.
     Alba will be examining how the children of immigrants fare in different countries that have received a great deal of immigration since 1950. The countries will include the U.S., Canada, Australia, France, Germany (where Alba had two previous Fulbright fellowships), and the United Kingdom. Alba notes that he has made good use of language instruction at the University, studying advanced German with professor Silke VanNess, and also improving his French with faculty member Cynthia Fox. 
    “One motivation for the project is that Americans have been very focused on immigration for a long time, but we only think about immigration in American society. We assume the U.S. is unique in its capacity to absorb immigrants,” said Alba, who earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University. “I plan to test this assumption of exceptionalism by looking at how the children of immigrants do in other countries. Immigration is a worldwide phenomenon and we can learn from the experience of other countries.”
     This idea that the degree of integration of immigrants is unique in the U.S. stops us from looking further.
     “Thus, we are unable to fix with any certainty the ways in which integration in other societies may resemble or vary from that in the U.S. . . .Without a wide-ranging comparative analysis, it is impossible to imagine that we can fully grasp the prospects for, and the conditions supporting, a persistent and fluent bilingualism,” Alba  notes in his proposal.
     Indeed, Alba believes that tremendous gains can be made by moving away from country-specific studies, and studying trends within a common analytical framework.
    “Realizing these gains is all the more pressing because very large questions hover over the trajectories of the second generations in contemporary immigration societies,” Alba notes in his proposal.
    Some of the questions he is asking include the following:

• Is assimilation, once prevalent among the children of past immigrants to the U.S. and France, still applicable to contemporary immigrations? And does assimilation occur mainly in countries which have national ideologies to actively promote it?
• Will transnational connections on a scale never before seen in human history forestall assimilation and engender ethnic pluralism to a new extent?
• Finally, does the phenomenon of  ‘segmented’ assimilation, or assimilation into disadvantaged-minority status, only occur among certain groups deemed black by North American standards, or does this occur on a broader scale, for example, to North African groups in France?