We are pleased to announce the 2015 Max Beberman Distinguished Alumni award recipient, W. Ford Doolittle, Uni High class of 1959.   

 Doolittle will be honored at a dinner May 22 at Biaggi's at 5 p.m. and serve as Uni's 2015 Commencement speaker May 23. The dinner is open to the public but seating is limited. Please RSVP to Andrea Shaw, 217-300-3121.

Earlier on May 22, Doolittle will speak at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at noon as part of the Pioneers in Genomic Biology Lecture series. The topic is "Putting the functional back into Functional Genomics: The lessons from ENCODE."  

In 2014 Doolittle was awarded the Herzberg Gold Medal for Science and Engineering, the top award given by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.  He was a Guggenheim Fellow and is a member of American Academy of Microbiology, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, an Institute Fellow of CIFAR and a Foreign Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. 

Doolittle has been at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia since 1971.  The Urbana native attended local schools and graduated from Uni High in 1959. He earned a BA in Biochemical Science from Harvard College in 1963 and a PhD in Biological Science from Stanford University in 1969 with a focus on bacterial genetics. He joined the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Dalhousie in 1971 and has been there ever since. He is now Professor Emeritus, but still working full time. 

For 20 years he was the Director of the Program in Evolutionary Biology of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), and for seven, a CRC Chair. Doolittle received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2013.

The Beberman award was established in honor of the late Max Beberman, University of Illinois Laboratory High School Math Department Head and University of Illinois professor, whose distinguished career as a math educator brought him international renown.