UCSB is honored to welcome this year's commencement speakers:

• Saturday, June 14, at 9:00 a.m.
  Science and Mathematics
  Daniel P. Burnham
  Retired Chairman and CEO of Raytheon Company,
  in Waltham, Massachusetts
   
• Saturday, June 14, at 1:00 p.m.
  Engineering and Science
  Wes Bush
  President and Chief Operating Officer for Northrop Grumman Corporation
   
• Sunday, June 15, at 9:00 a.m.
  Social Sciences II
  Emmett D. Carson, Ph.D.
  CEO and President of Silicon Valley Community Foundation
   
• Sunday, June 15, at 1:00 p.m.
  Humanities and Fine Arts
  Renée Montagne
  Host of NPR's Morning Edition
   
• Sunday, June 15, at 4:00 p.m.
  Graduate Division
  Dr. Leroy Chiao
  NASA Astronaut, Entrepreneur, Distinguished Chair Professor, and Consultant
   

Daniel P. Burnham

Mr. Burnham is the retired chairman and CEO of Raytheon Company, in Waltham, Massachusetts. He retired in January 2004. Mr. Burnham joined Raytheon in July 1998.

Prior to Raytheon, Mr. Burnham joined AlliedSignal, Inc. in 1982, most recently serving as vice chairman and a member of the board of directors. He has also held positions as president, Plastics and Performance Materials; president, Fibers; and president, Aerospace, the company’s largest business and the world’s largest supplier of equipment and sub-systems to the aerospace industry.

Mr. Burnham also held positions of increasing responsibility with the Carborundum Company from 1971 to 1982.

Mr. Burnham is a director of First Data Corporation; a member of the board of trustees of LMI, a not-for profit government consulting firm located in Washington, D.C.; past chairman of the Minority Supplier Development Council; past chairman of the President’s National Security Advisory Committee; past chairman of the Aerospace Industries Association; and a member of the Business Council. He is on the boards of several technology ventures.

Mr. Burnham received a bachelor’s degree in economics (magna cum laude) from Xavier University in 1968, a master’s of business administration from the University of New Hampshire in 1970, as well as honorary degrees from Pepperdine University and Bentley College. Mr. Burnham and his wife, Meg reside in Santa Barbara. They have 4 grown children and 4 grandchildren. Mr. Burnham became a trustee of The UC Santa Barbara Foundation in 2005

Wes Bush

Bush was appointed president in May 2006 and chief operating officer in March 2007. He also serves on the company's corporate policy council. He was appointed corporate vice president and chief financial officer for the company in 2005. In 2003, he was appointed Space Technology sector president and held complete general management responsibilities for that business. Prior to the acquisition of TRW by Northrop Grumman, Bush had served since 2001 as president and CEO for TRW's UK-based global Aeronautical Systems.

Bush joined TRW in 1987 as a systems engineer and has held a series of increasingly responsible roles. In 1996 he was named program manager of a defense satellite program for the defense systems division, responsible for management of the satellite and ground segment developments, launch services, and operations and maintenance. He became vice president of TRW Space & Electronics' planning and business development in 1998, where his duties included managing the organization's planning, resource management, and strategic development initiatives.

Beginning in 1999, Bush was vice president and general manager of the telecommunication programs division. In this position he was responsible for managing the development and production of telecommunication systems and products with an emphasis on advanced satellite and terrestrial wireless communications.

From 2000 to 2001, he served as vice president and general manager of TRW Ventures, an organization focused on leveraging TRW's advanced technologies to create new business opportunities in commercial markets. Prior to joining TRW, Bush held engineering positions with both the Aerospace Corporation and Comsat Labs.

He earned a bachelor's degree and a Master of Science degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also is a graduate of UCLA's Executive Management Program. He lives in Manhattan Beach with his wife, Natalie, and their three children.

Emmett D. Carson

Emmett D. Carson, Ph.D. is internationally recognized as a catalyst for progressive social change. A renowned speaker, he has published more than 75 works on philanthropy and social justice.

Emmett serves as the first CEO and president of the new Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which resulted from the historic merger of Community Foundation Silicon Valley and Peninsula Community Foundation. With $1.9 billion in total assets, the community foundation is the largest on the West Coast and one of the largest in the nation and is dedicated to advancing civic engagement to address the most challenging problems facing San Mateo and Santa Clara counties.

Prior to his appointment, Emmett served for 12 years as president and CEO of The Minneapolis Foundation, where he pioneered several community initiatives and increased assets from $186 million to over $600 million. Previously, Emmett served as the first manager of the Ford Foundation's worldwide grantmaking program on philanthropy and the nonprofit sector. He also has worked for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and the Congressional Research Service.

Emmett serves on several nonprofit boards, including the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, Northern California Grantmakers and Southern Education Foundation. He is a past chair of the Council on Foundations and has received numerous nonprofit leadership awards including recognition by The Nonprofit Times as one of the 50 most influential nonprofit leaders in the United States.

Emmett received his Ph.D. and a master's in public administration in public and international affairs from Princeton University and a bachelor's degree in economics, Phi Beta Kappa, from Morehouse College.

Renée Montagne

Renée Montagne is host of NPR's Morning Edition, the most widely heard broadcast news program in the United States. Since 2004, she has been broadcasting from NPR West in Culver City, California, with co-host Steve Inskeep in Washington.

Montagne is a familiar voice on NPR. She hosted All Things Considered with Robert Siegel for two years. She has worked for NPR's Science, National and Foreign desks. Over the years, Montagne has done thousands of interviews on a wide range of topics: Kurt Vonnegut on how he transformed surviving the WWII firebombing of Dresden into the novel Slaughterhouse Five; National Guardsmen on how they handle the holidays in Iraq; Paul McCartney on singing the old songs; a Hollywood historian on how the famous hillside sign came to be; Toni Morrison on the dreams and memories she turned into novels; and Bud Montagne, Renee's father, remembering the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the spring of 2005, Montagne took Morning Edition to Rome for the funeral Pope John Paul ll. She co-anchored from Vatican City during a historic week when millions of pilgrims and virtually every world leader descended on the City.

Since September 11, Montagne traveled throughout Afghanistan, interviewing farmers and mullahs, women and poll workers, the President and an infamous warlord. She has produced three series: 2002's "Recreating Afghanistan"; "Afghanistan Votes" in 2004; and 2006's "The War: Five Years On."

In 1990, Montagne traveled to South Africa to cover Nelson Mandela's release from prison, and continued to report from South Africa for three years. In 1994, she and a team of NPR reporters won a prestigious Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for coverage of South Africa's historic presidential and parliamentary elections.

Through most of the 1980s, Montagne was based in New York, working as an independent producer and reporter for both NPR and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Prior to that, she worked as a reporter/editor for Pacific News Service in San Francisco. She began her career as news director of the city's community radio station, KPOO, while still at university.

In addition to the duPont Columbia Award, Montagne has been honored by the Foreign Press Club for her coverage of Afghanistan, and by the National Association of Black Journalists for a series on Black musicians going to war.

Montagne, the daughter of a Marine Corps family, was born in California and raised in locales as diverse as Hawaii and Arizona. She earned a B.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. Her career includes serving as a fellow at the University of Southern California with the National Arts Journalism Program (currently based at Columbia University), and teaching broadcast writing at New York University's Graduate Department of Journalism.

Dr. Leroy Chiao

Astronaut Leroy Chiao, Ph.D., received a master's degree and doctorate in Chemical Engineering from UC Santa Barbara in 1985 and 1987. He is an entrepreneur, distinguished chair professor, and consultant. Dr. Chiao has extensive experience as a NASA astronaut and prior to that, as a research engineer. Involved in entrepreneurial business ventures around the world, he works in the US, China, Japan and Russia. He is an Executive Vice President and a Director of Excalibur Almaz, a private manned spaceflight company. In addition, he is a Director of InNexus, a biotechnology/pharmaceutical development company. Dr. Chiao is also the first Raborn Distinguished Chair Max Faget Mechanical Engineering Professor at Louisiana State University. Active as a consultant and public speaker, he also serves as the Chairman of the National Space Biomedical Research Institute User Panel, which is attached to the Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Chiao is a Director of Challenger Center and is an advisor to the Heinlein Prize Trust.

Dr. Chiao left NASA in December, 2005 following a fifteen-year career with the agency. A veteran of four space missions, Dr. Chiao most recently served as Commander and NASA Science Officer of Expedition 10 aboard the International Space Station. He has logged over 229 days in space - over 36 hours of which were spent in Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA, or spacewalks).

A native English speaker, Dr. Chiao also speaks Mandarin Chinese and Russian. He has flown space missions and worked closely with Russian, Japanese and European astronauts and their affiliated space agencies. Dr. Chiao is uniquely qualified to speak about the United States, Russian, Japanese, European and Chinese Space Programs. A Space Station Commander and Space Shuttle Mission Specialist, Dr. Chiao was also a certified co-pilot of the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. He is an expert in all facets of U.S. and Russian EVA hardware and operations and is EVA certified in U.S. and Russian spacesuits, tools, and training programs. In September 2006, Chiao became the first American to visit the Astronaut Research and Training Center of China. There, he met the first two national Chinese astronauts, Yang Liwei and Fei Junlong.

Dr. Chiao studied Chemical Engineering, earning a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1983. He continued his studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, earning his Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in 1985 and 1987. Prior to joining NASA in 1990, he worked as a Research Engineer at Hexcel Corporation and then at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab.