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Provost Carol Folt: Mr. President, for the degree, Doctor of Science, Michael Gazzaniga.
[Applause]
President Jim Yong Kim: Michael Gazzaniga, if the brain is the final frontier, then you
are one of its greatest explorers. In your own words, you are a firm believer
in the beauty and wonder of science. Your father, a surgeon, cultivated your childhood
interest by helping you set up a biochemistry lab in the garage.
After following your older brother to Dartmouth, you were expected to go to medical school,
but a summer job at the California Institute of Technology in the lab of psychobiologist
Roger Sperry lit a spark that became a bonfire. After graduating from Dartmouth fifty years
ago, you returned to Sperry's lab as a graduate student. There, your groundbreaking research
gave the world a critical understanding of the ways in which the hemispheres of the brain
specialize and work together. In addition to undertaking a host of national
leadership roles, you have trained and mentored many scientists in your career. In 1996 you
returned to Hanover as a member of the Dartmouth faculty, teaching scores of undergraduate
and graduate students, and establishing Dartmouth's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.
Your landmark work, The Cognitive Neurosciences, is recognized as the sourcebook for the field.
You also served for eight years on the President’s Council on Bioethics where, along with people
with vastly different backgrounds and experiences, you tackled the moral questions surrounding
such issues as cloning, aging, and stem cell research.
In 2005, your career came full circle as you returned to the site of your first faculty
appointment, the University of California at Santa Barbara, where you run the SAGE Center
for the Study of the Mind. In May, you were elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Mike, you have taken your place in history as the father of cognitive neuroscience. For
your extraordinary contributions to the field, and to the worlds of philosophy, psychology,
linguistics, and anthropology, Dartmouth is proud to award you the honorary degree Doctor
of Science.