Honorary Degrees 2007
The Chancellor Sir Christian Bonington has presented honorary degrees to four eminent individuals during the July degree ceremonies.
Professor Steve Long,
Professor Steve Long, Robert Emerson professor in Plant Biology and Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois, was awarded a doctor of science and also gave a special lecture entitled Plants Mitigating Global Change via Sustainable Biofuel Production.
His research focuses on the direct effects of atmospheric change on vegetation and ecosystems. He is listed by Science Citation Index as one of the 250 most cited authors in Animal & Plant Biology and one of the 25 most cited in Global Climate Change.
He also directs the Illinois Council for Food and Agricultural Research Special Research Initiative on Bioenergy, a multidisciplinary research project, and he is Chief and Founding Editor of the journal Global Change Biology. He has served on committees for research on global climate change for the European Union Cooperation in Science and Technology initiatives, the United Nations Environment Program, the UK Natural Environment Research Council, and the US Department of Energy. He gave a Congressional Briefing on the impacts of atmospheric change on Midwest crops and on opportunities for mitigation in 2005 and in February this year provided a briefing to President Bush at the White House on opportunities for mitigation through renewable fuels from crop systems. He is Deputy Director of the newly announced University of California at Berkeley and University of Illinois Energy Bioscience Institute – which was awarded $500M over 10 years by BP and which opens this month.
Michael Wood
Known to television audiences as a writer and presenter of many critically acclaimed series, Michael Wood is author of over eighty TV films that have been seen worldwide.
Educated at Manchester Grammar School, he then went on to Oriel College, Oxford, where he did postgraduate research in Anglo-Saxon history. He had ambitions to be a medieval historian but was drawn away by television and the possibilities of popularising history, which has always been his great passion. Since then he has worked as a journalist, broadcaster and film maker.
Professor Matti Krusius
Matti Krusius is a physicist who investigates the properties of matter at very low temperatures. Of particular interest are low temperature quantum systems, superconductors and superfluids, in which particle motion can occur without resistance and losses. This is a field of research in which the University of Lancaster is world-famous. He has held positions as professor of physics at the University of Turku and for the last two decades at the Helsinki University of Technology in Finland. He has also been doing research as a senior scientist for four years at the University of California in San Diego and in Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Sir Tom McKillop FRS, FRSE, FRSC, FMedSci, FIChemE
Tom McKillop joined ICI's Corporate Research Laboratory at Runcorn in 1969 after post-doctoral research work in Paris, his early research interests ranging from synthetic chemistry to quantum mechanics and molecular biology.
He moved to ICI Pharmaceuticals Division in 1975 and held a number of positions in Research, including Director of Research for ICI's Pharmaceutical Business in France, before being appointed General Manager (Research) and then General Manager (Development). In 1989 he was appointed Technical Director of ICI Pharmaceuticals, a role in which he had international responsibility for Research, Development and Production.
In 1994, he was appointed Chief Executive Officer of Zeneca Pharmaceuticals - Zeneca having demerged from ICI in 1993 - and, on completion of the merger of Astra and Zeneca in April 1999, he became Chief Executive of AstraZeneca PLC, a position he held until retiring on 31 December 2005. His wider industry activities included periods as Chairman of the British Pharma Group, President of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, Chairman of the Pharmaceutical Industry Task Force, and as a member of The European Round Table of Industrialists.