Reception will honor honorary degree recipients Please join us for a reception to honor UND honorary degree recipients Russell Lefevre and Laurel Reuter, 2:30 to 4 p.m. Friday, May 11, North Dakota Museum of Art. Russell Lefevre is a Life Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Born and raised in Grafton, he earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in physics from UND, and a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara. At Hughes Aircraft Co., he was the lead engineer for the first Navy airborne multi-mode radar. At Technology Service Corp., his activities included identifying advanced technologies, performing R&D on promising new applications, developing business opportunities and strategies, and organizing proposal activities. He had a lead role in securing more than 80 Small Business Innovations Rewards. During 2001, Lefevre was an IEEE-USA congressional Fellow, serving as science advisor to Sen. Jay Rockefeller. He was the Senate staff person responsible for organizing the activity leading the the NSF math and science partnership program to make a significant improvement in K-12 education. He was personally responsible for inclusion of the Noyce Scholarships for college students who major in a technical field and commit to teaching two years for each year of support in a Title 1 K-12 school. Lefevre is the 2007 president-elect of the IEEE, currently serves as vice president for technology policy, and was past president of that organization's Aerospace and Electronics Systems Society. Laurel Reuter is the founder and director of the North Dakota Museum of Art. She was raised in Tokio, N.D., on what is now the Spirit Lake Indian Reservation. He earned two undergraduate degrees and a master's in English from UND. She started what is now the museum as a student gallery on the top floor of the Memorial Union in the early 1970s while a graduate student in English. Her goal, she said, was "to build the best small museum in America." In 1996 the museum became a private, not-for-profit cultural institution. In 1999, Reuter received the Award of Distinction from the National Council of Art Administrators. The museum's work within the Greater Grand Forks community after the Flood of 1997 received wide recognition in the media. Reuter has curated more than 100 exhibitions, and has written "Whole Cloth," co-edited "Under the Whelming Tide: 1997 Flood of the Red Viver Valley of the North," essays and catalogs. In 1998, she was one of 20 people profiled by the Bismarck Tribune in their first edition of Notable North Dakotans. This April, she was cited in the New York Times for putting together a traveling exhibit about the victims of terror through kidnapping in some totalitarian Latin American regimes.