Kenneth Brown, president of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), the leading international architectural, planning, engineering and interior design firm, will give the annual Bovay Lecture at Cornell University on April 13.

The lecture, sponsored by the Bovay Program for the Study of the History and Ethics of Professional Engineering and by the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell, will be given at 4:30 p.m. in McManus Lounge, first-floor conference center, in Hollister Hall on campus.

Brown, a graduate of Cornell (B.S. '74), was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he earned his M.A. in engineering science and economics. Prior to joining SOM as its president last June, Brown was a vice president of General Electric Co., where he was responsible for company operations in Southeast Asia. He joined GE in 1992 as manager of business development for the company's electrical distribution and control business in Plainville, Conn.

Born in Colorado Springs, Brown was an accomplished athlete while at Cornell, having been a member of the U.S. national eight-oared crew that won a gold medal at the 1974 world championships in Lucerne, Switzerland.

SOM has undertaken more than 10,000 architecture, engineering, interior design and planning projects in more than 50 countries. Founded in 1936, the company received the 1996 American Institute of Architects Firm Award for Distinguished Architecture, an award it previously had won in 1961.

The Bovay Program was endowed by Harry and Susan Bovay at Cornell's College of Engineering and at Texas A&M University to encourage young students to appreciate the history of the engineering profession and to build a strong sense of guiding values as they pursue its practice. Harry Bovay was a 1936 graduate of Cornell.