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  • Honorary Graduands - 2009/2010
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Honorary Graduands - 2009/10

UCL's Honorary Degree Ceremony took place on Monday 6 September in 2010.   To see photos of the evening and to find out more about the event click on the slideshow below, or scroll to the bottom of this screen to watch a video of the ceremony.

Professor Lorna Casselton

Doctor of Science
honoris causa (DSc)

“When I was an undergraduate, the whole university took the same examination papers, so coming top in Botany finals was certainly the highlight of my undergraduate days. I still found time for fun in my final year and as secretary of the student union entertainments committee helped organise one of the wonderful student balls at the Royal Festival Hall.”

Professor Lorna Ann Casselton is Emeritus Professor of Fungal Genetics in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford.

She started her teaching career as a Temporary Assistant Lecturer at Royal Holloway College in 1966 and moved to Queen Mary College in 1967, becoming Professor of Genetics in 1989. In 1991 she transferred her research group to the Plant Sciences department at Oxford University, becoming Professor of Fungal Genetics at the University of Oxford in 1997. Professor Casselton was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1999 and Foreign Secretary and Vice President of the Royal Society in November 2006 and Member of the Academia Europaea in 2008.

Now Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society, Professor Casselton is involved with all the Society’s international activities, including capacity-building programmes in Africa and administering international fellowships that bring young scientists from all over the world to work in the UK. As part of her role, Professor Casselton has given the Royal Society Rutherford Lecture in South Africa and Blackett Lecture in India, travelling to 27 different countries during three and a half years in office.

Professor Peter Ware Higgs

Doctor of Science
honoris causa (DSc)

Professor Peter Ware Higgs is a British theoretical physicist, best known for his proposal of spontaneous symmetry breaking as the origin of mass of spin-one particles, such as the W and Z bosons which carry the weak forces between elementary particles. This so-called Higgs mechanism, which had several inventors besides Higgs, predicts the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson.

In 1954, he was awarded a PhD from King’s College, London for a thesis entitled ‘Some Problems in the Theory of Molecular Vibrations’, work which signalled the start of his life-long interest in the application of the ideas of symmetry to physical systems. Professor Higgs has since held academic positions at Imperial College London, UCL and the University of Edinburgh, and was promoted to a Personal Chair of Theoretical Physics at Edinburgh in 1980, becoming Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh on his retirement in1996.

He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1974, to Fellow of the Royal Society in 1983 and to Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 1991.

Professor Jonathan Irvine Israel

Doctor of Literature
honoris causa (DLit)

“The highlight of my time at UCL was the discovery of Dutch studies as an organised discipline in its own right and in particular a series of wonderful discussions with Koen Swart, then professor of Dutch history at the College in which he pointed out to me that my previous research experience (in Spanish as well as Mexican archives) could form the basis for a worthwhile contribution to our knowledge of the Dutch Revolt and its aftermath. From this starting-point my first months of teaching and academic discussion at UCL in 1974-5 changed the whole direction of my career.”

Professor Jonathan Irvine Israel is a writer on Dutch history, the Age of Enlightenment and European Jewry.

Professor Israel studied history as an undergraduate at Queens’ College Cambridge in the 1960s, followed by a doctoral thesis on seventeenth century Mexico under Hugh Trevor-Roper at the University of Oxford. After holding a research fellowship at the University of Newcastle, he taught at the University of Hull and then at UCL from 1974 to 2000, where he held the chair in Dutch history and Institutions for sixteen years until leaving Britain to take up a chair at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

During the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s Professor Israel carried out extensive research into, and wrote many books on, seventeenth and eighteenth-century history in Mexico, Spain, France, Belgium, Britain, Curacao and the Netherlands.

A member of the British Academy and corresponding member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, he was awarded the Heineken Prize for History in 2008. His most recent book is Revolution of the Mind, Radical Enlightenment and Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton, 2010)

Professor Charles K Kao

Doctor of Science
honoris causa (DSc)

Charles Kao was born in Shanghai in 1933. He moved to Hong Kong in 1948 for his secondary school education and then went to the UK for further study. He obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in 1957, and his PhD from UCL in 1965.

He joined the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT), Woolwich, London, in 1957 and transferred to the corporation’s Standard Telecommunication Laboratories (STL) in Harlow, Essex, in 1960, where he meticulously studied glass fibres.

In January 1966, he presented his groundbreaking conclusions that stimulated into action a worldwide activity which has been growing exponentially since.

From 1970 to 1974, he took a four-year leave of absence from ITT, to take up the position as Reader and then Chair Professor of Electronics at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He returned to ITT, Roanoke, Virginia, USA, in 1974 as Chief Scientist and later became Director of Engineering.

In 1982, in recognition of his outstanding research and management abilities, ITT named him the first ITT Executive Scientist. At that time he spent a year in Germany at the Sel Laboratories in Stuttgart. Concurrently, he was appointed Adjunct Professor and Fellow of Trumbull College at Yale University. In 1986, he was the Corporate Director of Research.

From 1987 to 1996, he was the Vice-Chancellor (President) of CUHK.  He retired from this post in 1996 and spent a year as a roving lecturer in Southeast Asia, before taking up a consultancy for three years with HK Telecom. Now fully retired with health problems, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2009.

Professor Timothy Killeen

Doctor of Science
honoris causa (DSc)

“I arrived at UCL at the tender age of 17, entering the Physics and Astronomy department and staying 7 years (BSc, PhD and postdoctoral fellowship) – I did not know what a life-long attachment would follow! I am proud to have taken the wonderful education I received at UCL and turned it to what I hope will be seen as good and useful purpose. This feels in many ways like coming home.”

Professor Timothy Killeen is Assistant Director for the Geosciences at the US National Science Foundation and Lyall Research Professor at the Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department, University of Colorado, Boulder.

Professor Killeen started his academic career at UCL at the age of 17, taking a BSc at the university in 1972 and a PhD in 1975. He went on to build his academic career at the University of Michigan, holding a number of senior scientific positions including his appointment from 1997-2000 to Associate Vice President for Research at the university.

Professor Killeen’s other career roles have included those of Visiting Senior Scientist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Editor in Chief, Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, Director, National Center for Atmospheric Research and President of the American Geophysical Union.

Professor Killeen is author or co-author of more than 140 peer-reviewed publications, and among his many honours are membership of the National Academy of Engineering, elected presidency of the American Geophysical Union and fellowship of the American Meteorological Society.

Professor Killeen has recently been tasked by the White House (President’s Science Advisor) to chair the development of the 10-year strategic plan for the federal US effort in climate science, to include the basic research, adaptation, mitigation, and climate services aspects. This effort will guide the multi-agency federal activities in climate science from 2013-2023.

Neil MacGregor

Doctor of Literature
honoris causa (DLit)

Neil MacGregor has been Director of the British Museum since August 2002 and has devoted particular attention to developing the Museum’s regional and international partnerships. He is Chair of the World Collections Programme – an initiative to establish partnerships between six major cultural institutions in the UK and institutions in Asia and Africa.

Mr MacGregor sits on the Board of the National Theatre and the International Advisory Board of the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. In both his current and his previous role as Director of the National Gallery, Neil worked closely with BBC radio and television to bring the collections to the widest possible public.

Mr MacGregor read modern languages at New College, Oxford. He took an LLB in Law at the University of Edinburgh and was called to the Scottish Bar. He then studied art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, afterwards becoming a lecturer in the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Reading and a part-time lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art. In 1981 he became Editor of The Burlington Magazine and in 1987 became Director of the National Gallery.

The Rt. Hon. Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury

Doctor of Laws
honoris causa (LLD)

The Rt. Hon. Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury (in the county of Dorset) was appointed as Master of the Rolls with effect from 1 October 2009.

The Master of the Rolls is the Head of Civil Justice, and the second most senior judicial post in England and Wales after the Lord Chief Justice.

Lord Neuberger was born on 10 January 1948, and educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford University.

After working at NM Rothschild & Sons 1970–73, he was called to the Bar (Lincoln’s Inn) in 1974. He was made a Bencher for Lincoln’s Inn in 1993.

He was appointed as a Queen’s Counsel in 1987, and his first judicial appointment was as a Recorder, between 1990 and 1996. In 1996 he was appointed as a High Court Judge in the Chancery Division. He was the Supervisory Chancery Judge for the Midland, Wales and Chester and Western Circuits for 2000–04.

In January 2004 he was appointed as a Lord Justice of Appeal.

In January 2007 he was appointed as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary (a ‘Law Lord’) and given a life peerage.

Lord Neuberger led an investigation for the Bar Council into widening access to the barrister profession. He also served on the panel on fair access to the professions led by Alan Milburn.

The Baroness Professor Onora O’Neill of Bengarve

Doctor of Literature
honoris causa (DLit)

"I’m delighted to have a special connection with UCL. Over the years I have had many friends in its excellent philosophy department, and been to many professional meetings and academic seminars there. And like any philosopher I take special pleasure that the foundation of UCL is linked to Jeremy Bentham, and that his philosophy — and indeed the man himself! — is still part of UCL nearly two centuries later."

The Baroness Professor Onora O’Neill of Bengarve is a philosopher and a crossbench member of the House of Lords. She is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, where she still teaches, and Chair of Trustees for the Nuffield Foundation.

Professor O'Neill has taught at various universities in the US and the UK and was Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge from 1992 to 2006, and continues to teach philosophy at the university.

Professor O’Neill was President of the British Academy from 2005-9. She has served on the House of Lords Select Committees on Stem Cell Research, BBC Charter Review, Genomic Medicine and Nanotechnology and Food.

She has published many books on ethics and political philosophy, with particular interests in questions of international justice, in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and in bioethics. Currently, Professor O’Neill writes on practical judgement and normativity, trust and accountability in public life; and the ethics of communication (including media ethics), while continuing work on Kant’s philosophy.

To watch a video of the ceremony click on the image below.

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