College marshals honored at UCLA College commencement
UCLA College marshals Yogita Goyal, Stuart Brown and Jose Rodriguez.
UCLA College | June 12, 2023
Nominated and selected by the UCLA College deans for their outstanding contributions, UCLA College marshals occupy a place of honor at commencement. After heading the official party procession into the ceremony, these remarkable Bruin representatives formally begin the celebrations with their leadership.
Please join us in celebrating this year’s College marshals, who exemplify the highest ideals of UCLA:
11 A.M. CEREMONY
Yogita Goyal, professor of English and of African American studies at UCLA, studies race and postcolonialism with a special emphasis on African American and African literature from the 19th century to the present. She has broad interests in modern and contemporary literature and is the author of two monographs, “Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature” and “Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery,” winner of the René Wellek Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association, the Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative, and an honorable mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association. Goyal received a Distinguished Teaching Award and the Eby Award for the Art of Teaching from UCLA in 2022. She served as the director of departmental honors for English from 2013-16 and as undergraduate vice chair from 2019-22.
3 P.M. CEREMONY
Stuart Brown, chair and professor of physics and astronomy, researches the roles of dimensionality, electronic correlations and disorder in the properties of electronic materials. He is a condensed matter experimentalist whose research focus is mostly on the phases and properties of correlated electron systems, with particular focus on problems in unconventional superconductivity. The primary research tool of his UCLA laboratory is magnetic resonance under extreme conditions, including low temperatures, high magnetic fields, and other non-thermal tuning parameters such as pressure or strain. A UCLA faculty member since 1992, he was previously a director’s postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory and assistant professor of physics at the University of Florida. He received his Ph.D. in physics from UCLA in 1988, won a 2021 UCLA Division of Physical Sciences mentorship award and is a fellow of the American Physical Society.
7 P.M. CEREMONY
Jose Rodriguez, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, received his B.S. in biophysics and his Ph.D. in molecular biology from UCLA. He came to the U.S. from Mexico at a young age and attended public school in Los Angeles before going on to UCLA, where he earned the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute Gilliam Fellowship for Graduate Studies, conducted cancer research in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and worked on the development of imaging technologies and computational methods for biological systems. His research group develops and applies new scientific methods in bio-imaging to solve cellular and molecular structures and reveal undiscovered structures that influence chemistry, biology and medicine. Rodriguez’s many awards and honors include the Sloan Fellowship, the Packard Fellowship and the UCLA Chemistry and Biochemistry Herbert Newby McCoy Award.
