The University of Maine at Farmington announced that award-winning broadcast journalist Bill Green will be this year’s commencement speaker and will receive an honorary degree.

Graduating senior Bryce Neal, from New Gloucester, will give the student address.

Bill Green

The commencement ceremony is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. May 12, when Green will receive an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.

Green, who hosts the award-winning magazine program “Bill Green’s Maine,” was born in Bangor and attended schools there and later at the University of Maine. While in college, he began his career in news, eventually becoming a sportscaster at WLBZ and anchoring the weekend sports broadcast at WCSH.

In a news release, UMF President Kathryn A. Foster said Green was a “broadcasting legend in Maine.”

“He is a professional of the highest standards with a long history of excellence in his craft,” Foster said. “His stories and insights about the Maine way of life, its places and people, are at once educational and endearing. We are so proud to have him address our 2018 graduating class.”

A Registered Maine Guide, Green became a feature reporter at WCSH in Portland. In 2000, he began producing “Bill Green’s Maine.” In 2015, he won a Regional Edward R. Murrow Award for feature writing and an Emmy for Outstanding Light Feature. The following year, “Bill Green’s Maine” won the Regional Emmy as Outstanding Magazine Program in New England.

He is an inductee in the Maine Broadcasting Hall of Fame, the Maine Sports Hall of Fame and the Silver Circle of the New England Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. A senior warden at Trinity Episcopal Church in Portland, he and his wife live in Cumberland and have two grown children.

Neal, a geology major, was accepted last summer to do field research in Yellowstone National Park with the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates program. He investigated high-elevation ponds in Maine as a UMF research assistant. Neal also worked as an AmeriCorps volunteer with the Maine Conservation Corps and skied with UMF’s Nordic Ski Team. After graduation, he plans to do geophysical fieldwork for the EarthScope project, an NSF funded project.

The outdoor ceremony will be held behind the UMF Olsen Student Center and is free and open to the public. Guests of graduates are also welcome to watch the ceremony live in C131 in Roberts Learning Center. In case of bad weather, the ceremony will be held in the UMF Fitness & Recreation Center. Admission to the indoor ceremony will be limited to those who already have received Fitness and Recreation Center tickets.