MEDIA SIGN-IN tent will be to the right of the stage. Media seats will be clearly marked in VIP section on the left-hand side, near the front, of the middle section.

MEDIA PARKING IS AVAILABLE: You must enter the campus at Melbourne Avenue and 150^th Street (the Kissena Boulevard gate will be closed). Please bring press ID and arrive no later than 8:15 am—8 am is preferable—to receive on-campus parking.

Click on a name to read about some of our outstanding graduates and more about the commencement guests: Nelson Gil, Hadas Fruchter, Erica Leong, Sara Miller McCune, Christopher Navas, Howie Rose and Yakov Yabukov.

Howie Rose, an American sportscaster known as the radio voice of the New York Mets and the television announcer of the New York Islanders, will address the graduates. Rose has been the fulltime play-by-play announcer for WFAN Radio (the Mets flagship station) since 2004 and for MSG Plus (formerly Fox Sports Net New York) regional TV network since 1995.  Previously Rose broadcast the New York Rangers games on WFAN, including their Stanley Cup Championship season of 1993-1994. Before joining WFAN, the Queens native was a sportscaster for WCBS Radio and the NBC Radio Network.

Rose won New York Emmy awards in 1999 and 2003 for coverage as part of the Islanders broadcast crew. He also received the Dick Young Award from the New York Baseball Scouts in 1995 for service to baseball in the media and the New York State Broadcasters Award for play-by-play work during the 1994 Stanley Cup Playoffs. In April he was inducted into the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame and Museum. Rose broke into broadcasting in 1975 while at Queens College as one of the original voices of Sportsphone, a radio service that recorded the latest sports scores and news.  He received his undergraduate degree from QC in 1977.

Visionary publisher, philanthropist and entrepreneur Sara Miller McCune will receive an honorary doctorate of humane letters. Founder and executive chair of SAGE, a leading independent global academic publishing empire near Los Angeles, McCune heads a charitable foundation, the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The SAGE Center funds grassroots projects to create educational opportunities for the poor and underserved in the California counties where she lives and works. In 2007, McCune founded and is the executive chair of the nonprofit Miller-McCune Center for Research, Media and Public Policy, which publishes the award-winning print and online magazine Pacific Standard. She has also made significant contributions to organizations that promote the performing arts in Santa Barbara and London.

Additionally, McCune has received many awards for her philanthropy, community service and entrepreneurship. She is the recipient of the American Evaluation Association’s Special Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Field of Evaluation. She was also recognized as the “Spirit of Entrepreneurship” at the 2003 Ernst & Young nationwide Entrepreneur of the Year Awards Ceremony. McCune is a member of several boards of directors, including the Samuels Center of the CUNY Graduate School, the Center for the Advancement of Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science in Philadelphia. McCune received her undergraduate degree in 1961 from QC.

The student speaker is Yakov Yakubov, a Rego Park, Queens, resident who is graduating with a 4.0 GPA and plans to study dentistry at Columbia University in the fall. 

            
Yakov’s road to success began when he was accepted into Hunter College High School, where in his junior year he was selected to work in the neuroscience lab of QC Psychology Professor Richard J. Bodnar. After enrolling at QC, Yakov continued as the professor’s research assistant, and together they investigated how brain pathways associated with pleasure and reward affect feeding behavior in mice, particularly the consumption of fats and sugars. They presented their work at conferences in New York, San Diego and Chicago, and co-authored an article that was published in the peer-reviewed journal Brain Research.

Yakubov also competed for both domestic and international research internships. Last summer, he served as a neurobiology research lab assistant at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovet, Israel; he spent the prior summer in a similar capacity at Hunter College. In January, through Study Abroad, he went to the Galapagos Archipelago (off the coast of Ecuador) to study the region’s conservation and ecology.