Cambridge Honorary Degrees 2006

The Most Rev. and Rt Hon. Rowan Williams, who will receive an Honorary Doctorate in Divinity, was born in Swansea into a Welsh-speaking family. He was educated at Christ's College, Cambridge, and at Christ Church and Wadham College, Oxford where he obtained his doctorate. He has taught theology at Oxford and at Cambridge, where he was Dean of Clare College. In 1991 he became Bishop of Monmouth, and in 1999 Archbishop of Wales. In 2002 he was announced as the successor to George Carey as the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury. He is an Honorary Fellow of Christ's and Clare Colleges.

Professor Mervyn King, who will receive an Honorary Doctorate in Law, is Governor of the Bank of England, taking over in 2003 from Sir Edward George. He studied at King's College, Cambridge and Harvard, then taught at Cambridge and the University of Birmingham. He has also been Visiting Professor at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From October 1984 he was Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics where he founded the Financial Markets Group. He joined the Bank of England in March 1991 as Chief Economist and Executive Director, becoming Deputy Governor in 1997. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Fellow of King’s and St John’s Colleges, Cambridge and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He serves on the Advisory Council of the London Symphony Orchestra, is Patron of Worcestershire County Cricket Club and is a Trustee of the National Gallery.

Professor Njabulo Ndebele, who will receive an Honorary Doctorate in Law, was appointed Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town in South Africa in July 2000. A short-story writer and essayist, he was born in Western Native Township near Johannesburg, educated at the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland, Churchill College, Cambridge and the University of Denver. Since 1975 he has been an academic and an administrator in Southern African universities. His relatively small body of published work has had a great influence on South African literature. Rejecting protest fiction as an impoverishment of South African writing, Ndebele calls for 'storytelling' in the place of 'case-making' and praises writers who 'give African readers the opportunity to experience themselves as makers of culture'. He uses the example of the oral storyteller on the buses or trains who tells stories of a largely apolitical nature as tacit support for his own style of 'rediscovering the ordinary'.

Dr Charles Vest, who will also receive an Honorary Doctorate in Law, was President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1990 until December 2004. During his presidency, he placed special emphasis on enhancing undergraduate education, exploring new organizational forms to meet emerging directions in research and education, building a stronger international dimension into education and research programmes, developing stronger relations with industry, and enhancing racial and cultural diversity at MIT. He also devoted considerable energy to bringing issues concerning education and research to broader public attention and to strengthening national policy on science, engineering and education. With Lord Broers, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge (1996 – 2003) he was a driving force in the establishment of the Cambridge MIT Institute. Dr Vest's research interests are in the thermal sciences and the engineering applications of lasers and coherent optics. He is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and is a Life Member of the MIT Corporation, the Institute's board of trustees.

Professor Edward Witten will receive an Honorary Doctorate in Science. He is the Charles Simonyi Professor of Mathematical Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and a Fields Medallist. He is one of the world's leading researchers in string theory (as the founder of M-theory) and quantum field theory and is widely regarded as one of the most talented living physicists. He was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of a physicist specializing in gravitation and general relativity. He received his bachelor's degree from Brandeis University, worked briefly for George McGovern's presidential campaign, and then returned to academia, receiving a PhD from Princeton University in 1976. He was subsequently a Junior Fellow at Harvard University before joining Princeton as Professor of Physics in 1980.

Professor Ahmed Hassan Zewail is an Egyptian-American chemist, and the winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on femtochemistry, the area of physical chemistry examining how atoms in a molecule move during chemical reaction. Born in Damanhur and raised in Disuq, he received his first degrees from the University of Alexandria before moving from Egypt to the United States to complete his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. After some postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley, he was awarded a faculty appointment at Caltech in 1976, where he has remained. In 1990 he was made the first Linus Pauling Chair in Chemical Physics. Other international awards have included the Wolf Prize in Chemistry (1993) and the Robert A. Welch Award (1997). In 1999, he received Egypt's highest state honour, the Grand Collar of the Nile. He will receive an Honorary Doctorate in Science.

Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield, daughter of the judge and novelist John F. Drabble. She was awarded a major scholarship at Newnham College, Cambridge and obtained a starred double first in English. Her first novel, A Summer Bird Cage, was published in 1963. Though famous for her novels, Drabble also wrote several screenplays, plays, short stories, and some biographies as well as non-fiction books. She wrote comments on several literary classics and took on the editorship of the Oxford Companion to English Literature in 1985 and in 2000. She was awarded the CBE in 1980. She will receive an Honorary Doctorate in Letters.