 I'm Michael McRobbie and I'm the president of Indiana University. My real interest on graduating was in logic and mathematical logic. And the center in Australia, in fact at the time I think a true world center in that field was at the Australian National University. One of my professors from where I did my first degree had moved to ANU and I basically followed him. It was a truly marvellous experience. The professor who I very rapidly started working with was a man called Bob Meyer. In university life one meets many, many very smart people. One meets few true geniuses and Bob I think was a genuine genius. A man of extremely eccentric personal habits and for example he was nocturnal. So if you wanted to work with him you had to work with him between some time in the evening and four in the morning. But over that period he was I think at his absolute peak intellectually and I had the privilege of working with him and he was my principal doctoral supervisor. Not only do I think I got a wonderful research education as a graduate student but the broader intellectual environment at ANU I think was in Australia just unsurpassed. There was a constant flow of immensely distinguished people in all kinds of disciplines in the field. For example I remember seeing the famous philosopher Sir Isaac Berlin Nobel Prize winning physicist Paul Barak. I remember hearing him speak a number of times and that wasn't just once a semester. That was almost every couple of weeks you were seeing people of that quality were coming through. Research universities really are engines of economic development and I think are essential to any modern economy. By most measures it's the finest research university in Australia. When I was there half of the fellows of the Royal Society in Australia were all at ANU and the rest were scattered over all the other universities and I think that alone spoke for the quality of the institution. On behalf of the university I'd like to congratulate Professor Michael McRobbie as the 2015 alumnus of the year. His contributions internationally to higher education have been enormous and ANU is enormously proud to count him amongst our alumni.