MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Who better to explain to upcoming college graduates what the real world will expect of them than a successful scientist and educator who found himself in their shoes not so long ago?
Sean McWilliams, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at West Virginia University, will address August and December 2016 graduates Friday.
“I take it very seriously especially for someone relatively junior in their career as I am. I’m very honored and excited to be given the opportunity,” McWilliams said leading up to the Dec. 16 WVU commencement.
McWilliams is part of a global team of scientists who made one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs in the past century.
He hopes to share a message about the importance of collaboration.
“I try to relate that to the events of the day and a lot of the divisiveness that we see around us and how we are able to overcome that in science at least or we wouldn’t make the achievements that we have.”
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, research team discovered a prediction of an Albert Einstein theory.
The research team directly observed gravitational waves, ripples in space-time caused by the collision of two black holes about 1.4 billion years ago.
“One of the predictions is that if space time is curved, if you stir it up hard then it can wave like you stir up the surface of a pond. Then, the disturbance propagates away as waves. That was a prediction but we had never seen that until now,” explained the astrophysicist.
August and December 2016 graduates will participate in a 1:30 p.m. ceremony at the WVU coliseum.
Their commencement speaker said he is certain the audience he addresses has the reasoning and research skills to carry over into professional careers.
“You do you research to form an opinion. You can justify that opinion and you can evaluate other opinions to synthesize different ideas together. That’s the recipe for effective interaction with other people and teams of people,” McWilliams offered.
McWilliams received his M.S. and Ph.D. in physics from the University of Maryland-College Park. Before arriving at WVU, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton and Columbia universities, and at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
The new father expects to give the recent graduates his vote of confidence.
“I just had a newborn daughter. I’ve been thinking a lot about the future and I know it’s in the hands of these graduates who are going to go out and shape the world. I wish them all the luck in the world.”
President E. Gordon Gee will open the ceremony with welcoming remarks for the graduating class.