The Beloit College board of trustees approved the tenure and promotion of two faculty members during its spring meeting on Friday, Feb. 6. Kathryn Johnson and Diep Phan are both active scholars, celebrated teachers and advisers, as well as professors who have been highly involved on campus and in the Beloit community.

Artist, educator and activist Favianna Rodriguez will be the speaker at Beloit College’s 165^th commencement ceremony later this spring. In a letter to their classmates yesterday, Beloit’s senior class officers announced that Rodriguez had accepted their invitation to deliver the keynote address on Sunday, May 17, 2015 on the campus of Wisconsin’s oldest college.

Edith Widder, a deep-sea explorer and conservationist, has been selected to receive the 2015 Roy Chapman Andrews Society’s Distinguished Explorer Award. A bioluminescence specialist, Widder is a world leader in helping to design and invent new submersible instrumentation and equipment for deep-sea observations. In 2012, her innovations led to the first recordings of the giant squid, Architeuthis, in its natural habitat. This discovery will be the highlight of her award presentation titled “The Kraken Revealed: The Story Behind Finding the Giant Squid,” scheduled for Friday, March 20 at 4:30 p.m. in Eaton Chapel on the Beloit College campus.

Beloit College faculty and staff have organized a spring panel series titled #blacklivesmatterbeloit in response to the recent highly publicized shootings of unarmed black men nationally, subsequent grand jury decisions around those cases, and the resulting activism and protests that have taken place across the country. All three panels are free and open to the public. A kick-off panel is scheduled for tomorrow, Friday, Jan. 30 in Moore Lounge (second floor of Pearsons Hall) at 12:30 p.m.