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When Amber Hoffman graduates on May 6 from the University of Colorado at Boulder, she will have a little more than a week to finish preparing for a trip to Thailand to help victims of December's tsunami. Hoffman, 21, will leave May 14 to fly to Phuket, Thailand, where she will spend a week doing relief work. The trip has been in the works for a couple of months, but the time for action has nearly arrived.

Ceal Barry, former head coach of the University of Colorado at Boulder women's basketball team, will give the commencement address on Friday, May 6, during the CU-Boulder spring commencement ceremony. The ceremony, which is free and open to the public, will begin at 8:30 a.m. in Folsom Stadium, where 5,464 degrees will be conferred. For the first time since the spring commencement ceremony was moved to the stadium in 1992, the graduating students will be seated on the field rather than in the stands.

John Gibbons, White House science adviser to former President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1998, will speak at the University of Colorado at Boulder on Thursday, April 28.

MEDIA BRIEFING ADVISORY The University of Colorado at Boulder will host a media briefing at 11 a.m. on Monday, April 25, featuring new images from the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a worldwide tribute to the 15th anniversary of the orbiting telescope's launch.

The Boulder Faculty Assembly at the University of Colorado at Boulder has honored 11 recipients of its BFA Excellence Award for 2004-05. The $3,000 award is given annually for excellence in three categories: teaching, service, and research, scholarly and creative work. Up to four recipients are recognized in each category.

A major new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association confirms the contrarian thesis of a book by University of Colorado School of Law Professor Paul Campos titled "The Diet Myth: Why America's Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health."

University of Colorado at Boulder researchers say a bizarre group of microbes found living inside rocks in an inhospitable geothermal environment at Wyoming's Yellowstone National Park could provide tantalizing clues about ancient life on Earth and help steer the hunt for evidence of life on Mars.

Six alumni and the former director of the Women in Engineering Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder will be honored with the Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award at the 40th annual Engineering Awards Banquet April 22.

Professor William Reinhardt of the University of Washington will deliver the University of Colorado at Boulder's annual Phi Beta Kappa lecture titled "Chaos, the Birth of a New Science" on Monday, April 25. The talk, which is free and open to the public, will be at 5 p.m. in room 150 in the Eaton Humanities Building, located at the intersection of Macky Drive and Pleasant Avenue across from Macky Auditorium.

Prominent researchers Eugene Myers and David Haussler, who each played a central role in the decoding of the human genome, will present a joint lecture on the "Impact of Human Genome Research: Present and Future" April 22 at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The 90-minute talk is the fourth Mervyn Young Memorial Lecture and will begin at 3:15 p.m. in Ramaley Biology Building room C250. The presentation is intended for a general audience, and is free and open to the public.