Leading academics awarded honorary degrees
One of the world’s most distinguished international economists and a Nobel-prize winning low-temperature physicist are to be awarded honorary degrees by Lancaster University.
On Wednesday, December 8, 2004, economist Professor Jagdish Bhagwati and physicist Professor David Morris Lee will be made honorary graduates at a ceremony in Lancaster University’s Great Hall.
Meanwhile, in four higher degree ceremonies held on the same day, more than 1,500 post-graduate students from across the world will graduate. Lancaster University’s Chancellor Princess Alexandra will award the degrees. It will be her final degree ceremony before she steps down at the end of December after 40 years as Chancellor.
Professor Jagdish Bhagwati: Doctor of Laws (honoris causa)
Jagdish Bhagwati is one of the world's best-known trade scholars and a professor of economics at Columbia University in the United States. His three hundred papers and fifty books, have emphasised the importance of free trade, the benefits of globalisation, policy issues associated with the free movement of capital and labour, and provided the intellectual basis for India’s remarkable economic development under liberalisation.
He has made major contributions to pure theory and engaged with major practical policy problems as Economic Adviser to the Director-General of GATT, Special Adviser to the United Nations on Globalisation, External Adviser to the World Trade Organisation and a member of the United Nations High Level Advisory Group supporting the New Partnership for Africa’s Development. He also writes regularly for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times.
Professor David Morris Lee: Doctor of Science (honoris causa)
David Morris Lee, of Cornell University is one of the great low temperature physicists of modern times. He was fortunate as a graduate student to be one of the first to study the rare isotope helium-3, then becoming available as a by-product of the nuclear industry.
His work culminated in the co-award of the 1996 Nobel Prize for physics for the discovery superfluidity in liquid helium-3. Ultimately this led to the understanding that the quantum structure of liquid helium-three mimics the structure of space-time itself, an analogy which has long been a major preoccupation of the Lancaster group.
Lancaster University Physics Department is home to a world-renowned ultra low temperature group which achieved the lowest temperature ever reached in 1984 and again in 1993. Dave Lee has been an influential behind-the-scenes friend of low temperature physics at Lancaster University and his mild, easy-going manner cloaks a decisive and enquiring mind.