University honours broadcasters and a prominent scientist
Posted on 12 November 2004
The honorary degrees will be conferred at a ceremony in the University's Central Hall on 3 December when former BBC Director General Greg Dyke is installed as Chancellor.
Three of the honorary graduates have been nominated by the new Chancellor. One is Helen Boaden, who was controller of Radio 4 when the station was mired in the political storm which led to Mr Dyke's resignation as Director General of the BBC earlier this year. Now Director of News at the BBC, Ms Boaden began her broadcasting career in this country in Yorkshire.
Also nominated for honours by the new Chancellor will be writer and broadcaster, Lord Bragg, and Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality Trevor Phillips, both former colleagues of Greg Dyke at London Weekend Television in the 1980s.
The fourth honorary graduate will be the President of the Royal Society, Lord May of Oxford, who was previously the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser. He will be presented by Professor Angela Douglas of the University's Biology Department.
Lord Bragg
Writer and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg was born in Wigton, Cumbria. After studying modern history at Wadham College, Oxford, he entered the media as a BBC trainee in 1961 taking over the editorship of BBC2's first arts programme New Release three years later. He is perhaps best known for LWT's The South Bank Show in which he has sought to make the arts accessible to a wider public.
A prolific author, he has written more than a dozen books, a play, two musicals and several screenplays. Melvyn Bragg is now Controller of Arts and Features for Granada and is both writer and presenter of In Our Time on Radio 4. He chaired the Reith Lectures on globalisation and democracy and presented ITV's Two Thousand Years, a 20-part history of Christianity.
Melvyn Bragg is President of the National Campaign for the Arts and was made a Life Peer in 1998. He is Chancellor of the University of Leeds.
Helen Boaden
Director of BBC News Helen Boaden worked in broadcasting for 25 years. After completing her degree in English at the University of Sussex, she worked as a radio reporter in New York for a year before joining independent station Radio Tees.
She later worked for Radio Aire and joined the BBC as a producer with Radio Leeds in 1983. She moved to Radio 4 two years later, presenting Woman's Hour, before becoming editor of File on 4 in 1991. The programme won a Sony award for best current affairs programme for a report on Aids in Africa.
She was appointed head of Network Current Affairs in 1994 and head of Current Affairs and Business Programmes for BBC News three years later - the first woman to hold the post. She was made Controller of Radio 4 in 2000 and under her stewardship, Radio 4 clinched the station of the year prize at this year's Sony Radio Awards.
Trevor Phillips, OBE
Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality Trevor Phillips, who graduated from Imperial College, London, became the first black President of the National Union of Students in 1978.
He became a researcher in Current Affairs at London Weekend Television and presented and produced The London Programme for 13 years. Between 1992 and 1994 he was head of Current Affairs at LWT.
He has combined his career in the media with voluntary work and has been chair of the Runnymede Trust (1993-98), a member of London Arts Board and a trustee of the Ethnic Minorities Foundation.
In 1998, his independent production company, Pepper Productions, produced the Windrush series, chronicling the history of black people in Britain over the last 50 years.
Awarded an OBE in the 1999 New Years Honours List, he was elected to the chair of the London Assembly in May 2000 and was appointed to lead the CRE in January last year.
Lord May of Oxford
Lord May has been President of the Royal Society since 2000. For the previous five years, he was the UK Government's Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government, and Head of its Office of Science and Technology. He holds a Professorship jointly in the Department of Zoology, Oxford University, and at Imperial College, London as well as being a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford., Initially enrolled in Chemical Engineering, Lord May graduated with a BSc and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Sydney University. He then spent two years lecturing in Applied Mathematics at Harvard University, before returning to Sydney University later becoming the holder of its first Personal Chair in Theoretical Physics.
After developing an interest in the dynamics of animal populations, he became Professor of Zoology at Princeton University in 1973 and moved to Britain 15 years later as a Royal Society Research Professor. Apart from a huge breadth of research work, he has contributed to publications such as Nature and Science, newspapers, radio and TV.
He was awarded a Knighthood in 1996, appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1998, both for "services to science". In 2001 he was one of the first 15 Life Peers created by the House of Lords Appointments Commission. In 2002, the Queen appointed him to the Order of Merit. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1979, the Australian Academy of Sciences in 1991, Academia Europaea in 1994, and (as a Foreign Member) the US National Academy of Sciences in 1992.