Contact: Sammy McDavid
STARKVILLE, Miss.--Two Mississippi State graduates of the 1970s now holding major Magnolia State judicial posts will be featured speakers for the university's May 1 commencements.
More than 2,200 students are receiving 2010 spring semester degrees.
At 9 a.m., Mississippi Supreme Court Chief Justice William L. "Bill" Waller Jr. of Jackson will address graduates in the colleges of Arts and Sciences, Architecture, Art and Design, and Business. Waller is a 1974 general business information systems graduate.
At 2 p.m., U.S. Northern District Judge Sharion H. Aycock of Fulton speaks to the colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Education, Forest Resources, and Veterinary Medicine, and James Worth Bagley College of Engineering. She is a 1977 economics graduate.
Also at the respective assemblies, MSU alumni Richard C. Adkerson and Bobby S. Shackouls will receive honorary doctor of science degrees in recognition of their lifetime achievements and longtime major support of university programs.
Both graduation ceremonies will take place in Humphrey Coliseum.
Waller, a University of Mississippi Law School graduate, was a Jackson municipal judge before being elected to the state's highest court in 1996. Re-elected in 2004, he served as presiding justice from 2004-08 before assuming his current position last year. (For more, visit www.mssc.state.ms.us/appellate_courts/sc/bios/justicewaller.html.)
Aycock, a Mississippi College School of Law graduate, was in private practice before being elected judge of Mississippi's First Circuit Court District in 2003. She was nominated by President George W. Bush and approved by the U.S. Senate to the federal bench in 2007. (For more, visit www.fjc.gov/public/home.nsf/hisj.)
Adkerson, of Phoenix, Ariz., and New Orleans, La., is president, CEO and a director of Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc., a major international mining company. A 1969 accounting graduate who also holds a 1970 MSU master's degree in business administration, the former Kosciusko and Tupelo resident additionally serves as co-chairman of the board of McMoRan Exploration Co., a New Orleans-based oil and gas producer.
A past MSU Foundation president, among other university-related achievements, he made a $5 million gift in 2007 to endow what now is the business college's Richard C. Adkerson School of Accountancy. (For more, visit http://business.msstate.edu/accounting/adkerson%20biography.php.)
Shackouls, a Greenville native now of Houston, Texas, currently is vice president of the MSU Foundation's board of directors. He is the former chairman, president and CEO of Burlington Resources Inc., one of the world's largest independent oil and natural gas exploration and production companies. Though he retired after the company's acquisition by Conoco-Phillips Inc., the 1972 chemical engineering graduate continues as a director of Conoco-Phillips and of the Kroger Co.
A member of the MSU Foundation board of directors--also among other institutional achievements--Shackouls and wife Judy made a $10 million gift in 2006 to endow an honors college--the region's oldest and largest--that now bears their names. (For more, visit www.msstate.edu/web/media/detail.php?id=3417.)
For more information about Mississippi State University, see http://www.msstate.edu/.