Dr. Patrick Louchouarn to present Texas A&M University at Galveston summer commencement speech    

Texas A&M University at Galveston will hold its summer commencement ceremony and graduate brunch from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., Saturday, August 17. The ceremony will be held at the Classroom Laboratory Building auditorium, Room 100 on the Texas A&M University at Galveston Campus on Pelican Island. The graduate brunch will take place at the Mary Moody Northen Building.

Dr. Patrick Louchouarn will be the commencement speaker delivering a presentation titled “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants.” Louchouarn is vice president for Academic Affairs and chief academic officer at Texas A&M University at Galveston and associate provost, Texas A&M University.

Louchouarn oversees both the academic and research activities of the university. His responsibilities include leading efforts to attract, recruit and retain highly talented individuals to Galveston, as well as playing a central role to ensure the success of the university’s institutional goals. As such, he is working with both internal and external stakeholders to improve academic outcomes and to develop opportunities supporting research and educational programs.

Dr. Louchouarn has more than 20-years of experience as a teacher, researcher and leader. He has published extensively in the field of environmental chemistry and biogeochemistry and incorporated this research into inquiry-based educational models, which question how people learn and make decisions on environmental issues.

As a professor of Marine Sciences at Texas A&M University at Galveston with a joint appointment in the Department of Oceanography at Texas A&M University, he became the head of the department of Marine Sciences in 2010, and was appointed as interim vice-president and chief academic officer of the Texas A&M Galveston campus in 2012.

Formerly, he was a faculty member at Columbia University, where he held a joint appointment in the department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and the School of International and Public Affairs. In that position, he also served as the associate director of a new Masters’ program in Public Administration (Environmental Science and Policy), where he worked closely with a diverse group of earth, social, and health scientists to bring current knowledge of environmental change into the program’s curriculum.

His post-doctoral training was conducted at the University of Texas-Marine Science Institute, where he worked on dissolved organic matter cycling in the Arctic Ocean. He held an associate research scientist position at the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station until the fall of 2000, when he became assistant professor of Environmental Science at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi.

French-born, Dr. Louchouarn moved to Mexico City as a child, where he lived until his early 20s. After completing his preparatory education at the Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, he moved to Canada, where he received his undergraduate degree in Marine Biology, with Great Distinction – University Scholar from McGill University in Montreal. He then received his master’s degree in 1992 and Ph.D. in 1997 from the Université du Québec à Montréal in Environmental Sciences (geochemistry). His graduate research focused on understanding the cycling of trace metals (mercury) and terrestrial organic matter in freshwater and marine ecosystems.

Louchouran received a number of highly competitive awards during his graduate and post-graduate programs including the Eco-Research scholarship from the Canadian Ministry of the Environment, a Ph.D. scholarship from the Canadian Natural Science and Engineering Research Council, and a post-doctoral National Sciences Engineering Research Council scholarship. His passion for and dedication to teaching was recognized in 2010 through the Distinguished Achievement Award for Teaching from the Texas A&M University Association of Former Students.

He lives in League City with his wife Caroline and their two children, Noah and Teva.

For directions to the TAMUG campus, click here for directions to the TAMUG campus. Parking is available in any lot or contact campus police at (409) 740-45455.