Contact: Sammy McDavid
From left, Charles B. Cliett and Richard E. Holmes
Mississippi State's first African-American student and a pioneer leader in the university's aerospace engineering research program will be honored May 10 during spring graduation ceremonies.
Physician Richard E. Holmes, whose quiet enrollment in 1965 ended 85 years of segregation at the land-grant university, will deliver the commencement address. Charles B. Cliett, head emeritus of the aerospace engineering department, has been selected to receive an honorary doctorate in science for achievements in helping, among other things, to build one of the world's largest university-based flight mechanics laboratories.
More than 2,100 students are candidates for degrees. Commencement begins at 1:15 p.m. in Humphrey Coliseum.
Holmes, who grew up in Starkville and now resides in Columbus, recently returned to his alma mater as a member of the medical staff at the John C. Longest Student Health Center. Prior to that, he practiced emergency room medicine for many years in Birmingham, Ala. Holmes also completed a master's degree and additional graduate-level work at MSU before entering medical school at Michigan State University, from which he graduated in 1977.
In 1991, Mississippi State recognized his campus achievements and medical career by naming its cultural diversity center for him. Holmes and his wife Judy later endowed a minority scholarship fund that also was named in his honor.
Cliett, of West Point, led MSU aerospace engineering 1960-91. After completing bachelor's and master's degrees at the Georgia Institute of Technology and subsequent military service in the United States Navy, he joined the then-Mississippi State College faculty in 1947.
As department head, Cliett played the key role in focusing faculty research efforts in the areas of flight mechanics and the highly specialized--and, at the time, cutting-edge--research fields of computational fluid dynamics and magnetohydrodynamics.
In flight mechanics, his leadership of the department's Raspet Flight Laboratory helped lure domestic and international companies--among them Honda Research and Development of Japan--to seek MSU research expertise. The Honda project alone resulted in grants totaling $10 million and a new, fully-equipped research facility at the lab's Bryan Field location.
In the other two research areas, MSU eventually would become home to a prestigious National Science Foundation-designated Engineering Research Center as well as a unique U.S. Energy Department magnetohydrodynamics project.
Now known simply as ERC, the first specializes in the research designs of ships, supersonic aircraft and numerous other vessels and products simulated by campus-based supercomputers that are among the world's most powerful. Having evolved in its mission and been renamed the Diagnostic Instrumentation and Analysis Laboratory, the latter specializes in, among other areas, the use of lasers to collect research data in very high heat and other extreme environments.
ATTN: NEWS EDITORS/DIRECTORS
Limited media seating will be available in the radio broadcast area, which is located just inside Portal E of Humphrey Coliseum's outer concourse. If you have questions, please call Sammy McDavid at (662) 325-3442.