Encaenia and Honorary degrees 2013

The Honorands were:

The Honourable Andrew Li Kwok Nang, GBM, CBE, LLM

Degree of Doctor of Civil Law, honoris causa

Former Chief Justice of the Court of Final Appeal of Hong Kong

 The Honourable Andrew Li Kwok Nang was born in Hong Kong and read law at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, of which he is now an Honorary Fellow. He was called to the Middle Temple, of which he is now an Honorary Bencher, in 1970 and to the Hong Kong Bar three years later. He was subsequently appointed Queen’s Counsel in 1988. In 1997, upon the resumption of the exercise of sovereignty by China, he was appointed as the first Chief Justice of the Court of Final Appeal of Hong Kong, the Head of the Judiciary. He stood down from that role in 2010.

He has served as a member of the Executive Council of Hong Kong, Steward of the Hong Kong Jockey Club, Chairman of the Hong Kong University Grants Committee and of the Hong Kong Land Development Corporation, Vice-Chairman of the Council of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Vice-Chairman of the Council of St Paul’s Co-Educational College. He has also served on the Judicial Service Commission, the Law Reform Commission and the Securities Commission.

He is currently Trustee of the Friends of Tsinghua University Law School Charitable Trust, Guest Professor at Tsinghua University, and Honorary Professor of Law at a number of universities in Hong Kong. He holds honorary doctorates from several universities, including the University of Hong Kong, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the University of New South Wales and Tsinghua University. In 2008 he was awarded the Grand Bauhinia Medal, Hong Kong’s highest honour which is awarded by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government in recognition of life-long and highly significant contributions to the well-being of Hong Kong.

Dame Anne Owers, DBE, BA

Degree of Doctor of Civil Law, honoris causa

Chair of the Independent Police Complaints Commission

Dame Anne Owers, DBE, BA, read history at Girton College, Cambridge. After graduating, she spent three years in Zambia teaching and conducting research into African history. While taking time out to bring up her three children, she continued to undertake research and voluntary advice and race relations work. In 1981 she joined the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants as research and development officer; four years later she was appointed its general secretary.

From 1992 to 2001 she served as director of the human rights and law reform group Justice, whose miscarriage of justice work led to the creation of the Criminal Cases Review Commission. In 2001 she was appointed Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales, in which capacity she served until 2010. Her remit included inspections of prisons, immigration removal centres, military detention and police custody. Between 2010 and 2011 she chaired an independent review of the prison system in Northern Ireland, and in 2012 was appointed Chair of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC).

She was a member of the Lord Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Legal Education and Conduct and its successor body from 1997 to 2000; of the Home Office Task Force on the Human Rights Act from 1999 to 2001; and of the Legal Services Consultative Panel from 2000 to 2001. She was Chair of Christian Aid from 2008 to 2012.

She is currently a non-executive director of the Criminal Cases Review Commission and holds a number of other voluntary roles in the area of penal policy and activity. Appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2001 for her work on human rights, she was elevated to Dame Commander in 2009 in recognition of her services to the criminal justice system. She is an honorary fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge and of South Bank University, and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Essex.

Professor Anthony Grafton, AB PhD

Degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa

Historian

Professor Anthony Grafton studied history and history of science at the University of Chicago and University College London. He spent a year teaching at Cornell University, before moving in 1975 to Princeton, where he has been Henry Putnam University Professor of History and the Humanities since 2000.

At Princeton he founded the Freshman Seminar Program, which he directed for ten years, and served as Director of the Program in European Cultural Studies, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Research and the Council of the Humanities. His many books include Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship; The Footnote: A Curious History; What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe; Christianity and the Transformation of the Book (with Megan Williams); Worlds Made by Words; and ‘I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue’: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and A Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (with Joanna Weinberg).

He has contributed articles and reviews to a range of publications including the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and the Times Literary Supplement. A member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a corresponding fellow of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and the British Academy, he has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

He has been a visiting professor at the Collège de France, Columbia University, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, the École Normale Supérieure, the Warburg Haus, and the University of Munich; and has held visiting fellowships at Pembroke College and Merton College. His many honours include the 2002 Balzan Prize for History of the Humanities and the 2003 Mellon Foundation Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities.

Sir Tom Stoppard, OM, CBE

Degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa

Playwright

Sir Tom Stoppard was born in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, and moved to England, via Singapore and India, as a child. He began his working life in 1954 as a junior reporter on the Western Daily Press. In 1967 his first full-length play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, was staged by the National Theatre. It was followed by other award-winning works, including Jumpers, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (with André Previn), Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink, The Invention of Love, The Coast of Utopia (a trilogy) and Rock’n’Roll.

His many stage adaptations and translations include Undiscovered Country (Schnitzler), On the Razzle (Nestroy), Rough Crossing (Molnar), The Seagull (Chekhov), Henry IV (Pirandello), Heroes (Sibleyras), Ivanov (Chekhov) and The Cherry Orchard (Chekhov).

He is also known for his work for radio, television and film. His screen credits, as writer and co-writer, include Brazil, Empire of the Sun, Enigma, and Shakespeare in Love, for which he won an Academy Award for best original screenplay and a Berlin International Film Festival Silver Bear for outstanding achievement. He also directed his own screenplay of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

His most recent work includes, for screen, Anna Karenina and, for television, the BBC 2 series Parade’s End. His many other prizes include four Tony Awards (1968, 1976, 1984 and 2007) and the Critics' Circle Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts (2007). He has been repeatedly honoured at the London Theatre Critics Awards, the New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, the New York Critics Awards, and the London Evening Standard Awards. He holds honorary degrees from a number of universities, including Yale and Cambridge. He was knighted in 1997 and in 2000 was appointed to the Order of Merit by Her Majesty The Queen.

Professor Ingrid Daubechies, BS PhD

Degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa

Mathematician

Professor Ingrid Daubechies was born in Houthalen, Belgium. After reading for undergraduate and doctoral degrees in physics at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, she taught there for 12 years before joining AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1987, where she became a leading authority on wavelet theory. In 1987 she constructed a class of wavelets that were identically zero outside a finite interval, now among the most common type of wavelets used in applications.

Whilst at AT&T Bell Laboratories she spent time at the University of Michigan and Rutgers University. In 1994 she became the first woman full professor of mathematics at Princeton University. She was elected as the first woman president of the International Mathematical Union in 2010 and one year later was appointed James B Duke Professor of Mathematics at Duke University.

Her numerous prizes include the American Mathematical Society’s Leroy P Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition (1994); the American Mathematical Society’s Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics (1997); the National Academy of Sciences Medal in Mathematics (2000); the Pioneer Prize of the International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (2006, with Heinz Engl); the Jack S Kilby Signal Processing Medal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (2011); and the American Mathematical Society’s Leroy P Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research (2011). In 2012 she received the Frederic Esser Nemmers Prize in Mathematics, one of the largest monetary awards in the United States for outstanding achievements in mathematics, for ‘her numerous and lasting contributions to applied and computational analysis and for the remarkable impact her work has had across engineering and the sciences.’

She is a member of, amongst others, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the London Mathematical Society, and holds Fellowships of the American Mathematical Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and a number of international learned societies. She has honorary degrees from five European universities.

Baroness Grey-Thompson, DBE, DL, BA

Degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa

Paralympian

Baroness (Tanni) Grey-Thompson was born in Cardiff and read politics at Loughborough University. She won her first Paralympic medal, the 400 metres bronze, in Seoul in 1988. Despite spinal surgery which forced her to take a year away from the track, four years later she won gold in the 100, 200, 400 and 800 metres and silver in the 4x100 metres relay at the 1992 Barcelona Paralympics. That same year saw the first of her six London Wheelchair Marathon victories.

At the 1996 Atlanta Paralympics, she won gold in the 800 metres and silver in the 100, 200 and 400 metres. Four years later, in Sydney, she claimed four gold medals in the 100, 200, 400 and 800 metres. At her final Paralympics in Athens in 2004, she took gold in the 100 and 400 metres, bringing her Paralympic medal tally to eleven gold, four silver and one bronze. She retired from competitive sport in 2007 and now plays an active role in the administration of sport.

She is Vice-President of the Women's Sports Foundation, Patron of Sports Leaders UK, and a member of the Laureus World Sports Academy, and was involved in London’s successful bid for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. In 2008, she was appointed to the board of Transport for London, where she chairs the Surface Transport and Remuneration committees. She is also a member of the board of the London Marathon and of the London Legacy Development Corporation, and has been President of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations since 2012. In 2005 she was made a Dame for services to sport and in 2010 she entered the House of Lords as a crossbench peer. She has been Pro Chancellor of Staffordshire University since 2005 and holds honorary degrees from 26 UK higher education institutions.

Mr Colin Smith, CBE, BSc

Degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa

Engineer

Colin Smith joined Rolls-Royce as an undergraduate apprentice in 1974, working at the Leavesden engine factory. He read mechanical engineering at the University of Southampton and, following graduation, worked on a number of helicopter engine projects for the company before becoming Chief Engineer of Small Engines at its Bristol site.

In 1994 he moved to the company’s largest UK site in Derby to be Chief Engineer for the Trent 700 engine. He was subsequently Head of Engineering for Compressors and Fans, in which role he led the team that turned 3D aerodynamics and swept-fan technology into exploitable improvements in engine performance, and then Chief Engineer for the Trent 500 engine. In 2001 he was appointed Director of Engineering and Technology for Civil Aerospace and four years later became Director of Research and Technology, in which capacity he was responsible for the co-ordination and integration of research and technology programmes and strategies across Rolls-Royce. In 2005 he was promoted to the position of Director of Engineering and Technology, and took up a seat on the Rolls-Royce board.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Aeronautical Society and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and was a Royal Academy Silver Medal winner in 2002. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Strathclyde, the University of Southampton and Loughborough University. In 2012 he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in recognition of his services to engineering in the UK.

Mr Murray Perahia, Hon KBE, BMus

Degree of Doctor of Music, honoris causa

Pianist

Murray Perahia was born in New York and began playing piano at the age of four. Educated at Mannes College, he spent summer holidays at the Marlboro Festival, collaborating with musician such as Rudolf Serkin, Pablo Casals and the members of the Budapest String Quartet. He also studied during this period with Mieczyslaw Horszowski.

In 1972 he won the Leeds International Piano Competition, which led to solo recital engagements throughout Europe. In 1973 he gave his first concert at the Aldeburgh Festival, where he worked closely with Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, accompanying the latter in many lieder recitals. He was co-artistic director of the Festival from 1981 to 1989.

He is the winner of two Best Instrumental Soloist Grammys: the first, in 1998, for his Bach's English Suites Nos 1, 3 and 6; the second, in 2002, for his Chopin's Etudes, Op 10 and Op 25. He has received many other Grammy nominations, won several Gramophone Awards and was the inaugural recipient of the Piano Award in 2012. He has performed with the world’s leading orchestras and has been Principal Guest Conductor of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields since 2001. He has also been artist-in-residence at the Philharmonie Berlin. His discography is wide and varied and his most recent release, Brahms’ Handel Variations, has been described as ‘one of the most rewarding Brahms recitals currently available’.

He recently began an ambitious project to edit the complete Beethoven Sonatas for the Henle Urtext Edition, and has produced and edited hours of recordings of recently discovered masterclasses by Alfred Cortot. An honorary fellow of the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music, he holds honorary degrees from the University of Leeds, Duke University and the Weizmann Institute of Science. In 2004 he was made an honorary Knight Commander of the British Empire for his outstanding service to music.