ABC News Science Correspondent Dr. Michael Guillen to Speak at Centenary Aug. 26

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (6/96)
Contact: Lynn B. Stewart, Centenary News Service
318-869-5120 or 869-5709
lstewart@beta.centenary.edu

SHREVEPORT, LA -- Dr. Michael Guillen, Harvard instructor and ABC science correspondent, will kick off Centenary College's 1996-97 academic year with an address at 11:30 a.m. Monday, Aug. 26 in Brown Chapel. He is the author of Five Equations That Changed the World.

Guillen's appearance will be the first event in a year-long series of programs related to the year's theme of "Change." All first-time students at Centenary will receive a copy of Guillen's book, as will members of the Centenary faculty. They will discuss the book and related issues during orientation activities and during classes.

Guillen's lecture, being presented during the annual President's Convocation, is open to the public.

At Harvard, he is an instructor of physics and mathematics in the Core Curriculum Program. He joined ABC's Good Morning America as the program's science editor on February, 1988. He also became an ABC News science correspondent in May 1990, appearing regularly on ABC News' Nightline.

Dr. Guillen has traveled around the world for Good Morning America. He was the first television correspondent to cross under the English Channel through the just-completed Chunnel, as well as the first broadcast journalist to be allowed inside Arizona's controversial Biosphere-2, following the emergence of its eight-person crew.

He was also the first broadcaster to dive beneath the surface of Scotland's Loch Ness in a mini-submarine.

During Good Morning America's trip to Hong Kong, he scaled tall construction sites on bamboo scaffolding, probed the mysteries of ancient Chinese medicine and tested the scientific validity of fung shui. During the show's trip to Alaska, he traveled to Poke Flats to witness the Northern Lights, to Barrow to observe life at the northern-most point of our continent and even landed inside the mouth of Mt. Spurr, Alaska's most active volcano.

In recent years. Dr. Guillen was the first correspondent in television history to broadcast live to the United States from Antarctica, reporting on the infamous ozone hole above the South Pole. He also traveled to Australia and New Zealand, where he filed reports on the rare geysers and mud flats of New Zealand and on the desperate efforts to protect Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest organism.

He has also traveled to Israel's Qumran caves to trace the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and to Costa Rica's Monteverde Cloud Forest, a unique tropical forest threatened by the area's development.

Dr. Guillen has covered some of the biggest man-made and natural disaster stories. He journeyed to Kuwait to cover the oil fires and their effect on the environment, and the destruction of the Kuwait Institute of Scientific Research. He also traveled against the flow of humanity to arrive in the Philippines and Japan and report on the explosions of Mt. Pinatubo and Mt. Unzen, respectively. He also visited the epicenters of San Francisco's historic Loma Prieta earthquake and Southern California's Yucca Valley quake, the largest in 40 years.

Dr. Guillen is a leader in the U.S. campaign to eliminate illiteracy in science and math. His latest book, Five Equations That Changed the World, was published by Hyperion in 1995. His best-selling book, Bridges to Infinity: The Human Side of Mathematics (1984), has been translated into German, Japanese, Portuguese and French.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Dr. Guillen received the bachelor of science degree from the University of California - Los Angeles. He earned the master of science and Ph.D. degrees in physics, mathematics and astronomy from Cornell University. He is married and resides in Brookline, Mass.

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