BAR HARBOR — Journalist Robert Krulwich will be the speaker at College of the Atlantic’s 40th commencement on Saturday, June 2, 2012. Eighty-five students are expected to receive diplomas in human ecology, COA’s one major.

Mr. Krulwich, who is the co-host of “RadioLab” and a correspondent for National Public Radio, has been called “the most inventive network reporter in television” by TV Guide.

At COA, the senior class traditionally chooses its graduation speaker. According to Mr. Krulwich, when he got the call asking if he would be the speaker, “I was, to put it mildly, flattered. I don’t know if this is a totally romantic notion, but over the years I’ve heard so much about the place, and especially about the students, that I think that if I could roll backwards in time and be 18 all over again, I might be IN this class instead of giving them a speech. There are schools that say to kids, ‘Come here and we will teach you how to manage, to be a force in the world.’ But some schools, and COA is surely one of them, say something different. They say, ‘Come here and we’ll ask you to reimagine the world.’ That’s why I want to talk to the seniors in June. I want to hang out with a bunch of fellow-reimaginers.”

COA President Darron Collins joins the seniors in anticipation of this visit. “We look forward to doing some serious reimagining with Bob this June,” he says. “And that often calls for someone who can find and describe and experiment with the most essential elements of very complicated phenomena – few do that as well as he does.”

Mr. Krulwich’s NPR blog, “Krulwich Wonders,” features drawings, cartoons and videos that illustrate hard-to-see concepts in science. As co-host of “RadioLab” with Jad Abumrad – which Ira Glass of “This American Life” called “an act of crazy genius” – Mr. Krulwich explores new developments in science for people who are curious but not usually drawn to science shows. RadioLab won a Peabody Award in 2011.

Mr. Krulwich earned a Bachelor of Arts in history from Oberlin College and a law degree from Columbia University. He never practiced law. Instead he joined Pacifica Radio during President Richard Nixon’s impeachment hearings, became Pacifica’s Washington Bureau chief, then did a stint as an editor for Rolling Stone magazine in Washington before moving to NPR where he started as an editor but eventually became a business and economics correspondent. He hosted a CBS weekly special during the first Gulf War, presented a PBS/BBC culture show “The Edge” in the 1990s, covered economics for Frontline and CBS, and moved on to science reporting at ABC. With Ted Koppel, he co-hosted a primetime series, “Brave New World,” about technology and its effect on our lives, which included commercial television’s only hour-long look at string theory.

He has won Emmy awards for a cultural history of Barbie and for a Frontline investigation of computers and privacy, a George Polk and Emmy for a look at the savings-and-loan bailout online advertising, and the 2010 Essay Prize from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. For years, he also hosted an improvisational comedy group with friends Jane Curtin, Buck Henry, and Tony Hendra, which performed at the White House for President Bill Clinton.

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