Eight Honoured by University of York
Posted on 3 July 2000
Victoria Glendinning is an author and journalist. She is perhaps best known for her biographies of Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell and Vita Sackville-West, Rebecca West and Anthony Trollope. Her novels include The Grown-Ups and Electricity and her newspaper and magazine reviews are published in Britain, Ireland and the United States. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the only person to have won the Whitbread Prize for biography twice.
John Grimshaw is the founder, director and chief engineer of Sustrans, a charity which encourages people to walk and cycle more. Its flagship project is the National Cycle Network. John Grimshaw has worked as a route designer and construction engineer on cycle routes since 1979. His previous work as a civil engineer included a VSO posting in Uganda. He has been awarded an MBE for his work for Sustrans.
Adam Hart-Davis presents the well known television series Local Heroes, in which he traces the lives and contributions of famous and obscure British scientists. In his enthusiasm for their innovation and imagination, and through his recreation of many of their experiments, ha has brought the entertainment and value of science to the attention of the viewing public. He has also written lively books on science and maths for teenagers. Adam Hart-Davis was one of York's first doctoral students in Chemistry and has continued his association with the city ever since. Last year he opened the Solar System (designed by three York staff) on one of the local cycle paths.
Jude Kelly is chief executive of the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, which she joined as artistic director in 1988. She began her career in the theatre as a folk and jazz singer and as an actress. Previously a director at the Solent People's Theatre, and artistic director of the Battersea Arts Centre and the National Theatre of Brent, she was also Festival Director of the York Mystery Plays from 1986-1988. She was awarded an OBE in 1997.
Professor Dusa McDuff is one of Britain's leading mathematicians and the only woman mathematician to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. She is best known for her work in the geometry of multi-dimensional structures. She has worked at the University of Cambridge, York, Warwick, and Princeton, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has worked for many years at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she is Professor of Mathematics. Her many honours include election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Outstanding Woman Scientist Award in 1997.
Professor Donald Michie is a scientist whose contributions to society have spanned a wide range of disciplines. As part of the war-time code breaking team at Bletchley Park, he helped to crack the FISH code, used for messages between the German high command. After taking degrees in biology from Oxford, he became a researcher in embryology with the team that set the foundations for in vitro fertilisation. At Edinburgh and Stanford Universities he pioneered work in artificial intelligence and machine learning, producing the first robot assembly capability.
Professor Peter Townsend has spent his career researching poverty, and has produced a number of powerful studies on inequality, social policy and relative deprivation. One of his key contributions has been to persuade policy makers to recognise the linkages between health and poverty. He was a founding member - and is now President - of the Child Poverty Action Group, and a founder of the Disability Alliance. He has taught at the LSE and at the Universities of Essex and Bristol, and has close links with York, particularly in the fields of child poverty, disability and living standards.
Baroness Young is Chairman of English Nature at a time of immense challenges in the conservation arena. Much of her career has been in the National Health Service, in which her last appointment was as district general manager of Parkside Health Authority. She became well known for her work as chief executive for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which she joined in 1991 and where she demonstrated her commitment to environmental causes. A working life peer, she is also Vice Chancellor of the BBC and a member of the UK Round Table on sustainability.