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Vish Venkataraman will speak at inauguration of President Paul Alivisatos

During the Friday, Oct. 29 inauguration of President Paul Alivisatos, Rockefeller Memorial Chapel will host speakers representing UChicago faculty, staff, students and alumni, and the local community at the inauguration of President Paul Alivisatos. Integrative biology student, Vish Venkataraman (Coates and Prince Labs) will be the student speaker. 

Vish studies the evolution and development of sensory systems and their relationship to the evolutionary morphology of vertebrates; in the lab, he studies the development of zebrafish and skates from embryos and combines this with information from the fossil record of early vertebrates. He has a long-standing interest in the relationship between science and philosophy, as well as in South Asian languages and literature, particularly Tamil and Sanskrit. 

As the speaker representing students, he said, his remarks will carry the theme of listening. “A university is like a symphony, composed of thousands of voices—some harmonious, some dissonant—and the university’s intellectual life is the net result of all of these voices,” he said. “All symphonies need a listener; the role of the president is to listen and uplift and add his own voice to the symphony.”

Venkataraman received his undergraduate degree in biology from the University of California, Berkeley, and his M.Sc. in paleobiology at the University of Bristol.

For more on the speaker see UChicago News Remarks will highlight the breadth of the University community