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University of York honours nine

Posted on 6 July 2005

The University of York is to award honorary degrees to a Nobel Prize winner, leading academics including one of its former Vice-Chancellors, and a woman who has championed social issues in the city for half a century.

They will receive honorary doctorates at the University next week (13, 14 and 15 July). The University confers honorary degrees each year on people who have made a significant contribution to society. Honorary graduates are selected from nominations by members of the University and often have links with departments or are alumni.

Barbara Scott

Barbara Scott spent her entire career in further education eventually becoming Deputy to the Head of the School of Community Studies at York College of Arts and Technology (now York College). She believed not enough was done for the less academically able and initiated the development of social care, home management and pre-nursing courses in York. A magistrate for 35 years, she was active in developing the services of York Family Planning Association in the 1950s and 1960s and was its secretary for 15 years and was a founder member of Compass, now one of the UK's foremost drug rehabilitation organisations.

Professor Paul Slack

Professor Slack is Professor of Early Modern Social History at Oxford University where he is Principal of Linacre College. He was a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of York between 1969 and 1972. Regarded as one of the finest early modern historians of his generation, he was elected to a Fellowship of the British Academy in 1990 and in 1999, awarded the title of Professor of Early Modern Social History at the University of Oxford. He returned to York in 2003 to give the inaugural Aylmer Memorial Lecture, in honour of the University's founding Professor of History, Gerald Aylmer.

Professor Sir Ron Cooke

Professor Cooke was Vice-Chancellor of the University of York from 1993 to 2002 and still lives in the city. A specialist in desert geomorphology with a particular interest in human use of the natural environment, he was President of the Royal Geographic Society from 2000 to 2003. He was awarded the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographic Society in 1994 for his contributions to geomorphology. He is also a member of the Higher Education Funding Council for England for seven years until 2003 and was knighted for services to higher education in January 2002.

Dick Homan

Dick Homan, the chair of the national Chemical Education Group since 1994, has been closely involved for 16 years with the educational activities of the Salters' Company whose collaboration with the University since 1983 has been a crucial element in York becoming the premier centre for the development of the school science curriculum in the UK. Dick Homan has played a major role in the continuing partnership between Salters has provided initial funding for a number of new research and development projects and in 2000 Salters funded the Chair Science Education in the Department of Chemistry.

Professor Sir John Lawton

Professor Sir John Lawton chairs the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, following his retirement as Chief Executive of the Natural Environment Research Council. He is a distinguished researcher whose work has provided a major contribution in understanding the natural world. A Lancastrian, who began his career in Durham, he took his doctorate at Oxford before becoming a lecturer at York in 1971. He was a member of the academic staff of the Biology department at York for 17 years, during which he undertook detailed investigation of the insect fauna of bracken on Skipwith Common, near Selby, which stands as a model of sustained and intensive ecological research.

Professor Sir Michael Atiyah

Professor Sir Michael Atiyah is regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians from the second half of the twentieth century. Educated at Manchester Grammar School -- when Lord James, the first Vice-Chancellor of the University of York , was High Master -- and Trinity College, Cambridge, he was elected to the Royal Society in 1962. He was appointed the Savilian Chair of Geometry at Oxford in 1963, and worked at Princeton before taking up a Royal Society Research Professorship in 1972. He was knighted in 1983 and seven years later became Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, first Director of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, and President of the Royal Society.

Dr Shirin Ebadi

Human rights campaigner Shirin Ebadi is the first Iranian and the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Prize. She was the first woman to serve as a judge in Iran but after the Islamic revolution in 1979, women judges were dismissed. Shirin Ebadi led the fight to regain Muslim womens' rights. After 10 years, she gained an attorney's licence and in 1994, she founded the Society for Protecting the Rights of the Child and conducted landmark defences of journalists, intellectuals and writers and their families accused of subversion. Her outspoken defence of human rights in Iran means she faces death threats, harassment and continuous surveillance.

Professor Sir Michael Rutter

Child Psychiatrist Professor Sir Michael Rutter, who was educated at Bootham School in York, has been Head of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry and Honorary Director of the Medical Research Council Child Psychiatry Unit. His studies of autism, depression, antisocial behaviour, reading difficulties, deprived children, overactive children and children whose psychiatric problems have a clear organic component has resulted in a prodigious output. He has published in 38 books and 400 scientific papers. In 1994 he set up the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Unit and more recently he has also been a key administrator at the Wellcome Foundation.

Professor David Wiggins

Professor David Wiggins, who was Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College, Oxford, between 1994 and 2000, had a youthful ambition to become a painter. But his enthusiasm for art was overtaken as a student by a fascination for philosophy and he is now regarded as one of the most creative philosophers of the modern age. Professor Wiggins has worked extensively in the USA as well as the UK where he has argued that study of the humanities should have equal importance to study of the natural sciences in the quest for human knowledge. Apart from philosophy, he has a keen interest in railways and, between 1977 and 1979 chaired the Transport Users' Consultative Committee for the South-East.