Winter commencement ceremony to be held April 29 at Crisler Center

March 26, 2018

U-M President Mark Schlissel will give the commencement address.

Congratulatory handshake at UM-Dearborn Commencement
UM-Dearborn Commencement

University of Michigan-Dearborn again will hold one winter commencement ceremony for all graduates at U-M’s Crisler Center in Ann Arbor. The ceremony will be held Sunday, April 29, at 1:30 p.m., with the student processional beginning at 1 p.m.

This marks the third consecutive year the winter ceremony has been held at Crisler Center to better accommodate a growing number of winter graduates and their families. Graduates are eligible to receive up to eight guest tickets, and all guests—including children over the age of 2—need a ticket to attend.

A live stream of commencement will be available for those unable to attend.

University of Michigan President Mark S. Schlissel will give the commencement address. Student Monica De Roche, alumnus Jeffrey Jewell (’09 M.S.Fin.) and Management Studies Associate Professor Joy Beatty also will give remarks.

Additional commencement information is available on UM-Dearborn’s website.    

U-M President Mark Schlissel
University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel

Mark S. Schlissel is the 14th president of the University of Michigan and the first physician-scientist to lead the institution. He became president in July 2014.

Schlissel previously was provost of Brown University, where he was responsible for all academic programmatic and budgetary functions within Brown's schools and colleges, as well as the libraries, research institutes and centers.

A graduate of Princeton University (A.B., summa cum laude, 1979, biochemical sciences), he earned both M.D. and Ph.D. degrees at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (1986, physiological chemistry). He did his residency training in internal medicine at Hopkins Hospital and conducted postdoctoral research as a Bristol-Myers Cancer Research Fellow under David Baltimore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Whitehead Institute.

Schlissel began his career as a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1991, where he earned a number of awards and fellowships for his research and teaching. He moved to the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California–Berkeley in 1999 as associate professor, advancing to full professor in 2002. He taught undergraduate and graduate courses in immunology as well as a large introductory course in biology for life science majors.

His research has focused on the developmental biology of B lymphocytes, the cell type in the immune system that secretes antibodies. His work has contributed to a detailed understanding of genetic factors involved in the production of antibodies and how mistakes in that process can lead to leukemia and lymphoma. He is the author or coauthor of over 100 scientific papers and has trained 21 successful doctoral candidates in his lab.

He was UC-Berkeley’s dean of biological sciences in the College of Letters & Science and held the C.H. Li Chair in Biochemistry until his appointment as Brown’s provost in 2011. He served as vice chair of the Molecular and Cell Biology Department from 2002-07.

Nationally, he has served as member and chair of the Immunobiology Study Section at the National Institutes of Health and on the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Scientific Review Board.

Schlissel was elected to the American Society of Clinical Investigators in 1998 and the American Association of Physicians in 2013. He has been a member of the American Association of Immunologists since 1992 and was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2013. He has helped organize major international scientific meetings and is a frequent seminar speaker at universities through the United States.

A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., Schlissel is married to Monica Schwebs, an environmental and energy lawyer. They have four grown children.