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Antonios “Andoni” Mourdoukoutas, a recent NSF Graduate Research Fellowship recipient from the Macaulay Honors College, is The City College of New York’s Class of 2016 Valedictorian. Orubba Almansouri, a Yemeni immigrant and SEEK student, will be the Salutatorian at CCNY’s 170th Commencement Exercises on June 3. First Lady Michelle Obama will be the speaker at the ceremony on CCNY’s South Campus Great Lawn. Following are brief bios of the Valedictorian and Salutatorian: Andoni MourdoukoutasA Long Island resident, Andoni is graduating with a BE in biomedical engineering and a 3.90 GPA. The NSF

To curb the advance of invasive raccoons on the island nation, City College of New York doctoral student Jamie Kass will work with Japanese scientists to model and track their spread. Kass is the recipient of a National Science Foundation grant to conduct research on this management issue through the East Asia Pacific Studies Institutes. He will be based at Yokohama National University this summer in the research lab of Dr. Fumito Koike, an expert in invasive species and ecological modeling. A member of City College biology professor Robert Anderson’s biogeography lab, Kass studies how

Renowned trumpet virtuoso Marvin Stamm, who has performed with legends such as Bill Evans, Quincy Jones, Wes Montgomery, Stanley Turrentine, Benny Goodman, and George Benson, is the guest artist at the 16th CUNY Jazz Festival at The City College of New York, May 5-6. Stamm will play as guest soloist with the City College Large Ensemble on May 5 at 7:30 p.m. and host an open jam session 8:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. He will perform at the closing gala concert at 7:30 p.m. on May 6 with his band, The Marvin Stamm Quartet. Along with Stamm, the all-star quartet features Bill Mays on piano, Rufus Reid on

Award-winning poet and author Marilyn Nelson is the guest poet at the 44th annual City College Poetry Festival, Friday, May 13. Up to 150 students from 50 schools are expected to recite their poems at this year’s event, dubbed “the Woodstock of the Spoken Word.” The all-day, all-verse event runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Marian Anderson Theater of City College’s Aaron Davis Hall. "The City College Poetry Festival is the democratic voice of poetry in New York City public schools,” said Pamela L. Laskin, a lecturer in the CCNY’s English department and director of the CCNY Poetry Outreach

Chayanne Marcano, an anthropology major in The City College of New York’s Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership, is spending this summer at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. after her latest honor. The junior is the recipient of a research internship at the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum. Marcano will work on a project examining the roles of community-based museums and gentrification in Washington, D.C. The Bronx native believes there is a power in community-based museums that can provide nontraditional audiences with the space to shape their own histories

More than 40 years ago, Coretta Scott King became the first female commencement speaker in the history of The City College of New York when she addressed CCNY’s Class of 1971. Her charge to the graduates came eight years after her slain husband, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had delivered the commencement address to the Class of 1963. City College’s tradition of notable commencement speakers continues on June 3, 2016, when Michelle Obama, the first African-American First Lady of the United States, speaks at the school’s 170th commencement exercises in Harlem. The occasion is likely to be more

The latest in a long line of physics defying, prize-winning concrete canoes out of The City College of New York’s Grove School of Engineering placed second overall in the Metropolitan Conference competition at Cook’s Pond in Denville, N.J. There were eight other participants including student teams from Fairleigh Dickinson University, Rutgers, New York University, Stony Brook and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Christened “The Concrete Jungle,” the City College canoe outscored entries from all the other institutions, with the exception of NYU, in three categories. These were: the final

Two City College of New York students, Victoria Juste and Timothy McGhee, have been awarded two-year Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowships by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The MMUF program is designed to encourage the most talented students from groups traditionally underrepresented in graduate education to enter PhD programs and to pursue careers in research and college teaching. Juste, a junior with a double major in biology and black studies, served as a Leonard Davis Fellow and a Colin Powell Community Engagement Fellow. As a fellow, she created a chapter of Peer Health Exchange, which

The culminating event for an innovative graduate program in educational theatre welcomes scores of young community members to The City College of New York on Saturday, May 7, for the Harlem Children’s Theatre Festival. From 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at City College’s Aaron Davis Hall, young audiences can watch performances adapted by students in the CCNY School of Education’s Graduate Program in Educational Theatre. The event is free and open to families from Harlem and surrounding communities. Performances and show times are: 10:15 a.m. “Good Night Balloon,” inspired by the children’s picture book

“Iodonator – C8,” the latest chemical powered vehicle designed by City College of New York engineering students, took first place at the Mid-Atlantic regional competition to qualify for the AIChE’s national finals in San Francisco this November. “This is the first time City College has placed first in an American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) regional or national competition,” said Dilan Mataraarachchi, a chemical engineering and captain of the CCNY Chem-E- Car team. CCNY competed against 27 other universities and colleges at the Mid-Atlantic competition, with Iodonator outperforming