Wednesday, August 22, 2018

5:00p.m - Edmunds Center

Convocation signifies the formal opening of the 2018-2019 academic year. All students, faculty and staff are asked to participate.

Faculty (in academic regalia) should gather in the Hollis Center Lounge at 4:30 p.m. in preparation for the processional. In the event of rain, faculty are to proceed directly to the Edmunds Center, southeast side of the lobby. Deadline to order rental regalia through the Stetson Bookstore is August 10, 2018.

Staff members should plan to arrive at the Edmunds Center at 4:30 p.m. Ushers will be available to direct you to designated seating on the floor, directly behind faculty.

Students will be seated by their graduating class. 

Convocation will count as a Cultural Credit. Students will scan their ID’s as they leave the Edmunds Center following the ceremony.

Following Convocation, students, faculty and staff are invited to join us for a Community Dinner in the newly-renovated Carlton Union Building (CUB). Students with meal plans will swipe their ID for entry. Faculty, staff and students without a meal plan will be complimentary.

Convocation will also be live streamed on the Stetson Broadcast Productions channel on Ustream.tv.

Keynote Speaker

Darash Desai '08, Ph.D.

Senior Research Specialist, Department of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University

Darash Desai, Ph.D., is a senior research scientist at Boston University, serving as the technical lead for the PharmaChk platform and technical adviser for The Partnership for Global Health Technologies. Desai graduated from Stetson University in 2008 with a Bachelor of Science degree in biochemistry and physics with minors in computer science and mathematics.

Desai’s work at Boston University is multipronged and focuses on the design and development of need-based global health technologies that deliver social impact in low-income countries. His doctoral work at Boston University centered on the development of PharmaChk, a portable tool for testing the quality of medicines. That work is being extended now as a portable platform for analyte quantification that leverages the binding properties of DNA aptamers to small molecule targets. His efforts in both experimentation and computation have been published in several journals, including PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America), Lab on a Chip (Royal Society of Chemistry) and The American Journal for Tropical Hygiene and Medicine. In addition, his work on PharmaChk has appeared in media outlets such as Scientific American, The Wall Street Journal and NPR.

Following Stetson University, Desai obtained his master’s and doctorate degrees from Boston University in biomedical engineering.