Approximately 2,500 students will be honored Friday, Dec. 12 for completing their academic degrees at the end of the summer and fall terms as Virginia Tech holds its 2008 Fall Commencement ceremonies in Cassell Coliseum on the Virginia Tech campus.

Andrew Young, chairman of GoodWorks International, will be the keynote speaker for the fourth annual Martin Luther King Jr. celebration at Virginia Tech.

Prefabricated housing has long been stigmatized by "cookie cutter" dwellings that offer limited spatial quality, but two recent Virginia Tech graduates have worked with faculty to design and build an innovative house for Habitat for Humanity that takes advantage of the prefabricated housing process while providing all the attributes of a custom-designed home.

The following individuals delivered the University Commencement address at Virginia Tech (dating back to 1959):

The following individuals delivered the Graduate Commencement address at Virginia Tech (dating back to 1995):

Accounting and information systems associate professor Steve Sheetz has received a grant from accounting and consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to investigate why more firms have not adopted XBRL -- eXtensible Business Reporting Language, part of a group of information systems languages used for communicating information between businesses and on the Internet.

Mosquitoes are like Typhoid Mary. They can spread viruses which cause West Nile fever, dengue fever, or yellow fever without themselves getting sick.

Intense glacial erosion has not only carved the surface of the highest coastal mountain range on earth, the spectacular St. Elias range in Alaska, but has elicited a structural response from deep within the mountain.

The following individuals delivered the University Commencement address at Virginia Tech (dating back to 1959):

Claudia P. Brodkin, manager of the undergraduate chemistry labs at Virginia Tech, was recently awarded the College of Science Diversity Award for 2008.

The following individuals delivered the University Commencement address at Virginia Tech (dating back to 1959):

The following individuals delivered the Graduate Commencement address at Virginia Tech (dating back to 1995):

The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) has awarded its Frederick W. Lanchester Prize research award to Hanif Sherali, a University Distinguished Professor and the W. Thomas Rice Chair of Engineering in the Virginia Tech Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

The Department of Computer Science in the College of Engineering, the School of Architecture + Design in the College of Architecture and Urban Studies, the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences' Undergraduate Research Institute, and a pair of departments working together, the Department of History and the Department of Teaching and Learning in the School of Education, will all receive the 2008 University Exemplary Department Award at a ceremony to be held Tuesday, Dec. 2 at The Inn at Virginia Tech.

The following individuals delivered the University Commencement address at Virginia Tech (dating back to 1959):