Encaenia and Honorary degrees 2011
The following honorary degrees were conferred at Encaenia on 29 June 2011, the Chancellor, the Rt Hon Lord Patten of Barnes presiding:
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- His Excellency Giorgio Napolitano
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Degree of Doctor of Civil Law 11th President of the Italian Republic
His Excellency Giorgio Napolitano was born in Naples. He studied Law at the University of Naples, and was active in the anti-fascist resistance during the Second World War. He joined the Italian Communist Party in 1945 and remained a member until its dissolution in 1991, when he joined the Democratic Party of the Left. He was first elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies in 1953, and was returned at all but one election until 1996.
During that time he served as a member of the Budget and State Holdings Committee; Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies; member of the Foreign Affairs Committee; Chairman of the Special Committee on the Reorganisation of the Broadcasting Sector; Chairman of the Foundation of the Chamber of Deputies; and from1996 to 1998 as Minister of the Interior and for the Coordination of Civil Protection.
He was a Member of the European Parliament from 1989 to 1992, and again from 1999 to 2004, when he was also Chairman of the Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs Committee.
Other positions have included President of the Italian Council of the European Movement and member of the Italian delegation to the North Atlantic Assembly. In 1997 he was awarded the Leibniz-Ring-Hannover Award in acknowledgement of his dedication to the cause of parliamentary democracy and his contribution to the rapprochement between the Italian left and European socialism. He was appointed a life senator in 2005 and the following year he was elected President of the Italian Republic.
He has lectured internationally throughout his career, and is the author or co-author of eight books on Italian and European politics. Hislatest, Dal PCI al socialismo europeo: un'autobiografia politica (From the PCI to European Socialism: a Political Autobiography) was published in 2005.
- Justice Edwin Cameron, BA, MA, LLB
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Degree of Doctor of Civil Law, honoris causaJustice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa
Justice Edwin Cameron was born in South Africa, and studied at the University of Stellenbosch before coming to Keble College as a Rhodes Scholar to read Jurisprudence. Following further study at the University of South Africa, he returned to Oxford to take a Bachelor of Civil Law.
He joined the Johannesburg Bar in 1983, and practised as a human rights lawyer at the University of the Witwatersrand's Centre for Applied Legal Studies, where he became Professor of Law in 1989. He co-drafted the Charter of Rights on AIDS and HIV, co-founded the AIDS Consortium and was the founding director of the AIDS Law Project.
He was appointed to the High Court by President Nelson Mandela in 1994, and served for a year in the Constitutional Court before being appointed to the Supreme Court of Appeal in 2000. Since 2009 he has been a Justice of the Constitutional Court. He is the co-author of Witness to AIDS, which won the Sunday Times Alan Paton Prize, Defiant Desire and Honoré's South African Law of Trusts.
He is General Secretary to the Rhodes Trust for Southern Africa, and the patron of many organisations, including the Guild Cottage Children's Home, the Soweto HIV/AIDS Counsellors' Association and Community AIDS Response.
He has been the recipient of awards internationally, including the Nelson Mandela Award for Health andHuman Rights; Transnet's HIV/AIDS Champions Award; the San Francisco AIDS Foundation's Excellence in Leadership Award; and a Special Award from the Bar of England and Wales. Justice Cameron is an Honorary Fellow of Keble College and of the Society for Advanced Legal Studies, an Honorary Bencher of the Middle Temple of London, and holds honorary degrees from King’s College London and the University of the Witwatersrand.
- Professor Sir Geoffrey Lloyd, MA, PhD
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Degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causaHistorian of Ancient Science
Geoffrey Lloyd studied for his undergraduate degree and doctorate at the University of Cambridge. He remained at Cambridge for most of his academic career, successively as Assistant Lecturer, Lecturer and Reader, and from 1983 until his retirement in 2000 as Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Science.
He held a Fellowship at King’s College until 1989,when he became Master of Darwin College, and is now an Honorary Fellow of both colleges. From 1992 to 2000 he also chaired the Trust of the Needham Research Institute, where he is now Senior Scholar in Residence, and where he continues his research, focusing on issues in cognitive science raised by the comparative study of ancient Greek and Chinese thought.
He has held a number of visiting professorships in North America, Europe and the Far East, at universities including Stanford, Berkeley, Cornell, Beijing daxue, Sendai, and the Institute for the History of Natural Science in Beijing, where he held the first Zhu Kezhen Visiting Professorship. He serves on the editorial committees of ten journals, and is the author or editor of 23 books, several of which have been translated into nine different languages. His latest book, Disciplines in the Making: Cross-cultural Perspectives on Elites, Learning and Innovation, was published in 2009 by OUP.
He is a Fellow of the British Academy; an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts andSciences; a Member of the International Academy for the History of Science; and a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society. He holds an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Athens and was knighted for ‘services to the history of thought’ in 1997. In 2007 he received the Kenyon Medal for classical scholarship from the British Academy.
- Dr Marilynne Robinson, BA, PhD
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Degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causaAuthor
Marilynne Robinson studied for an undergraduate degree at Brown University, before completing a doctorate at the University of Washington.
Her first novel, Housekeeping, which was published in 1981, received the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award for First Fiction and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the Academy of American Arts and Letters, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written numerous essays and book reviews for Harper’s, Paris Review and The New York Times Book Review, as well as several non-fiction books.
Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State and Nuclear Pollution, published in 1989, was a finalist for the National Book Award. This was followed in 1998 by a collection of essays, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought.
Her second novel, Gilead, published in 2004, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Home, a companion to Gilead, was published four years later, and won the LA Times Book Prize for fiction and the Orange Prize for Fiction. She received a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award in 1990 and the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts in 1998.
Dr Robinson has served as writer-inresidence and visiting professor at many colleges and universities, including the University of Kent, Amherst College and the University of Massachusetts. Since 1989 she has taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 2009, she held the Dwight H Terry Lectureship at Yale University, and her lectures were subsequently published in a collection entitled Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self.
In April 2010 she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and she was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2011.
- Professor Elizabeth Blackburn, AC, BSc, MSc, PhD
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Degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causaMolecular Biologist
Elizabeth Blackburn obtained her undergraduate and masters degrees from the University of Melbourne, and her doctorate from the University of Cambridge, before taking up a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University. In 1978 she joined the Department of Molecular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she held the posts of Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and from 1986 Professor of Molecular Biology.
In 1990 she joined the University of California, San Francisco, where she is currently Morris Herzstein Professor of Biology and Physiology in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics. Professor Blackburn’s research focuses on telomerase and telomere biology. In 2009 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, jointly with Carol Greider and Jack Szostak, for their discovery of the molecular nature of telomeres, the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes, and of telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes the telomere. Her other awards include: the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology; the Australia Prize; a Gairdner Foundation Award; the Lasker Basic Medical Research Award; the L’Oréal UNESCO Award for Women in Science; the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences; and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science.
She holds honorary doctorates from the University of Pennsylvania, Bard College, Brandeis University, the University of Chicago, Harvard University, Princeton University, Yale University and the University of Cambridge. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences; a Member of the Institute of Medicine; a Fellow of the Royal Society; a Fellowof the American Academy of Microbiology; and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
- Professor Dame Linda Partridge, BA, DPhil
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Degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causaGeneticist
Linda Partridge read Zoology at St Anne’s College, before completing a doctorate in the Department of Psychology. Following postdoctoral work at the University of York, she joined Edinburgh University’s Department of Zoology, where she held the posts of University Demonstrator, University Lecturer, Nuffield Research Fellow and Reader, and was from 1992 Professor of Evolutionary Biology and Darwin Research Fellow.
In 1994 she left Edinburgh to take up her current post as Weldon Professor of Biometry at University College London. She is also Director of the Institute of Healthy Ageing at UCL, and the Founding Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Biology of Ageing in Cologne. Her work on nutrition and nutrient-sensing signalling pathways has made fundamental contributions to understanding the ageing process, and ways in which health during later life can be improved.
She has been recognised by numerous awards, including: the Frink Medal of the Zoological Society of London; the Sewall Wright Award of the American Society of Naturalists; the Lord Cohen Medal of the British Society for Research on Ageing; the Medal of the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour; the Darwin-Wallace Medal from The Linnean Society of London; and the Royal Society Croonian Prize Lecture. She was awarded a CBE in 2003 for services to evolutionary biology and was made Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2009 for services to science. She holds an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews and is a Fellowof the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and a Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
- Professor Oliver Smithies, MA, DPhil
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Degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causaGeneticist
Oliver Smithies studied Physiology at Balliol College and took a second BA in Chemistry. He then completed a doctorate in Biochemistry, before leaving Oxford to take up a postdoctoral position at the University of Wisconsin. In 1954 he moved to the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories at the University of Toronto, where he developed starch gel electrophoresis, a process of separating proteins that he used to find genetic differences in humans.
In 1960 he returned to the University of Wisconsin and moved into genetics research, becoming Professor of Genetics in 1964, LJ Cole Research Professor of Genetics and Medical Genetics in 1971, and Hilldale Professor of Genetics in 1980. In 1988 he moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to take up the position of Excellence Professor of Pathology in the School of Medicine. His co-discovery of gene targeting, a technique used to create animal models of human diseases by introducing gene modifications in mice, fundamentally changed the science of genetic medicine, and in 2007 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, jointly with Mario Capecchi and Sir Martin Evans. He continues hisresearch in this area, focusing on the development of animal models to study how genes influence common disorders, including hypertension and diabetes.
Other awards include the Gairdner Foundation International Award; the Research Achievement Award of the American Heart Association; the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award; and the Wolf Prize in Medicine. Professor Smithies is a Member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Member of the US National Institute of Medicine, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society.
- Sir George Martin
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Degree of Doctor of Music, honoris causaRecord Producer
Sir George Martin served in the British Fleet Air Arm before studying composition, piano and oboe at the Guildhall School of Music. After graduation, he took up the post of assistant to the head of the Parlophone Records label at EMI, working with the esteemed classical artists of the day. He became head of the label in 1955 and started recording pioneering comedy records by the likes of Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Beyond the Fringe.
He signed the Beatles to EMI in 1962, starting a creative partnership that revolutionised studio recording. He has also composed or directed the musical scores of many films, including Yellow Submarine, Live and Let Die and the Academy
Award nominated A Hard Day’s Night. After leaving Parlophone, he turned independent, setting up AIR studios and working with artists as diverse as Jeff Beck, Jimmy Webb, America and The Mahavishnu Orchestra.Sir George is the author of three books: All You Need is Ears, Making Music and Summer of Love. He has received six Grammy Awards and two Ivor Novello Awards, and his documentary about the making of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album won a Palme d’Or at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival. He is an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music and an Honorary Fellow of the Guildhall Schoolof Music and Drama. He received a Music Industry Trusts’ Award in 1998 and the World Soundtrack Academy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002, and has been inducted into the American Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the UK Music Hall of Fame. He was appointed a CBE in 1988 for his services to themusic industry and was raised to the Knighthood in 1996.