Encaenia Honorary Degree ceremony

Mr Montek Singh Ahluwalia

Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, Government of India

‘Learned and brilliant counsellor, who have explained economic growth in your writings and promoted it in your career …’

Mr Montek Singh Ahluwalia was an undergraduate at the University of Delhi, a Rhodes Scholar at Magdalen College, of which he is now an Honorary Fellow, and a graduate student at St Antony’s College. He was President of the Oxford Union in 1966. He began his professional career as an economist with the World Bank, Washington DC, in 1968. For the next 11 years, he served the World Bank as Deputy Division Chief in the Public Finance Division and as the Chief of the Income Distribution Division in the Development Research Centre respectively. Returning to India in 1979, he has been extensively involved in India’s economics reforms as Commerce Secretary and in posts at the Ministry of Finance and Department of Economic Affairs. He was also the first Director of the Independent Evaluation Office at the International Monetary Fund. Publications and articles include co-authoring Re-distribution with Growth: An Approach to Policy and several articles in international professional journals.

Mr Yves Bonnefoy

Poet, critic, translator

‘Eloquent and luminous poet, who clothe deep thought in beautiful expression …’

Born in France, Yves Bonnefoy showed an early interest in mathematics before going on to study philosophy at the University of Paris, and later to pursue his interest in French and Italian art, studying under André Chastel at l’Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. His first book of poems, Du Mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve, published in 1953, quickly became a landmark in modern French poetry. His investigation into the ends and ethics of poetry has been pursued not only through poetry but also in his essays and translations. He has written widely on other poets, including Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé, published acclaimed translations of Shakespeare’s plays and has produced monographs on the visual arts, including the Baroque period in Rome, Miró and, most recently, Goya. He has been honoured in many countries including Italy, Japan and the USA; his numerous awards include the Prix des Critiques in 1971, the Prix Montaigne in 1978, and the Prix Balzan and the Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca in 1995. 

Ms Ariane Mnouchkine

Stage and film director

‘A bright star, whose beams light up the French stage …’

Ariane Mnouchkine is Director of the Théâtre du Soleil, the company she founded in 1964 with her contemporaries of the Theatre Association of the Students of Paris. The troupe operates as a creative collective with the aim of making theatre accessible. Its first major success was 1789 (1970), an interpretation of the French Revolution. In the 1980s she applied Japanese theatrical conventions to some of Shakespeare’s history plays and comedies: Richard II, Twelfth Night and Henry IV, Part 1. Oriental techniques were also employed in epics based on the lives of Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia (1985) and Mahatma Gandhi (L’Indiade, 1987). She has also directed films, including a live production of the epic play Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées) (2003), and Molière (1977). She was nominated for an Oscar for the screenplay of the 1964 film L’Homme de Rio. Together with the Théâtre du Soleil, she received the UNESCO Picasso Medal in 2005 in recognition of an outstanding contribution to the arts and culture.

Professor Thomas Nagel, FBA

University Professor, Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law, New York University

‘Wise master, in whose works weight and eloquence are combined …’

Professor Nagel was an undergraduate at Cornell University and a graduate student at Corpus Christi College (of which he is now an Honorary Fellow) and later at Harvard University. He taught at Berkeley from 1963 to 1966, at Princeton from 1966 to 1980, and since 1980 he has been established at New York University, where he is University Professor, Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law. He works in several areas of philosophy: ethics, political theory, philosophy of mind, and theory of knowledge. He has also brought philosophy to bear on questions of general human interest and public policy and was one of the founders of the journal Philosophy & Public Affairs, which provided a forum for philosophical discussion of such questions. His books include The Possibility of Altruism, Mortal Questions, The View from Nowhere and The Last Word. He is a recipient of the Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award and of the Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Member of the American Philosophical Society and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. 

Professor Bert Sakmann, MD

Director of the Department of Cell Biology and Professor of Physiology, Max Planck Institute for Medical Research

‘… a penetrating investigator of the tiniest things …’

Professor Sakmann studied at the Universities of Munich and Tübingen before completing his medical education at the University of Göttingen. He worked in the Department of Neurophysiology at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich and in the Department of Biophysics at University College London, before joining the Department of Neurobiology at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen in 1974. In 1979 he became a research associate in the membrane biology group at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, Heidelberg, becoming Head of the Membrane Physiology Unit in 1983 and Director of the Institute’s Department of Cell Physiology and Professor of Physiology in 1985. Together with Erwin Neher, he won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1991 for research into basic cell function and for their development of the patch-clamp technique, a laboratory method widely used in cell biology and neuroscience to detect electrical currents through cell membranes. He is a Foreign Member of the Royal Society and a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences (USA). 

Professor Sheila Evans Widnall, MS SCD, FRAES, FAAAS, FAIAA, FAPS

Institute Professor and Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

‘… a lady whose leadership has been as outstanding as her science …’

Professor Widnall completed both her undergraduate and postgraduate education in aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She continued her long association with the Institute when she was appointed Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1986 and served as Associate Provost from 1992 to 1993. She was the first female Secretary of the Air Force from 1993 to 1997 after which she returned to her faculty position at MIT; in 1998 she was appointed Institute Professor. She served as Vice-President of the National Academy of Engineering and as a member of the Executive Committee of the National Research Council of the National Academies. She is a past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. She has received numerous awards and honours, including the National Academy of Engineering Distinguished Service Award in 1993, and the Spirit of St Louis Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2001.

Professor Ada Yonath

Martin S and Helen Kimmel Professor of Structural Biology and director of the Helen and Milton A Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly, Weizmann Institute of Science

‘… an exceptional investigator of the foundations of living matter …’

Professor Yonath was an undergraduate and a Master’s student at the Hebrew University before completing her graduate studies at the Weizmann Institute of Science. She conducted postdoctoral studies at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT. In 1970 she established the first protein crystallography laboratory in Israel, which remained the only lab of its kind in the country for more than a decade. She pioneered ribosomal crystallography in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, which led in 1986 to the introduction of cryo-bio-crystallography. Between 1986 and 2004 she headed the Max Planck Research Unit at Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron, Hamburg, in tandem with her activities as a professor at the Weizmann Institute. She is a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), and a Member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. She has been awarded numerous honours, including the 2008 UNESCO-L’ORÉAL Prize for Women in Science.

Dame Carolyn Emma Kirkby, OBE, FGSM, FRCM, Hon FRAM, Hon FTCL

Soprano and proponent of Early Music

‘… an English nightingale, a tenth Muse …’

Dame Emma studied Classics as an undergraduate at Somerville College and sang for pleasure, notably with the Schola Cantorum. She joined the Taverner Choir in 1971 and in 1973 began her long association with the Consort of Musicke; with these groups and with the Academy of Ancient Music she took part in the early Decca Florilegium recordings. She has built long-term relationships with chamber groups and orchestras, in particular London Baroque, the Freiburger Barockorchester, L’Orfeo (of Linz) and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. She has appeared in several hundred recordings of all kinds, from madrigals of the Italian and English Renaissance to works in the 20th-century repertoire. In 1999 she was voted Artist of the Year by Classic FM Radio listeners and in 2007 a survey of critics for BBC Music Magazine placed her in the top 10 greatest sopranos.