Graduation 2008 - Profiles

Honorary degrees will be bestowed on a number of leading figures from fields ranging from genetics to design. Those to be honoured are:

Nicola Benedetti was named the BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2004, since when the Scots violinist has since gone on to captivate audiences and critics all over the world with her performances.

Born in Scotland of Italian heritage, Nicola began violin lessons at the age of five. She studied at the Yehudi Menuhin School from 1997 to 2002. Since leaving she has established herself as a major international artist, topping the Classical music charts, being nominated for Brit Awards and performing in the world's greatest concert halls.

In 2004 she performed at the opening ceremony of the Scottish Parliament and was named a Young Scot of the Year in 2006.

Nicola has devoted herself to humanitarian and educational causes. Since 2005 she has visited schools throughout the UK in conjunction with the CLIC Sargent for Children Practice-a-thon, in which she encourages pupils of all ages to pick up their instruments and enjoy classical music. Nicola is also a UNICEF Celebrity Supporter.

William Boyd is one of the most critically acclaimed novelists alive - his novels and stories have been published around the world and translated into thirty languages.

He has been described as a wry historian of 20th-century life and his ninth book, `Restless', won the 2006 Costa Novel of the Year which added to a clutch of previous awards.

Born in Accra, Ghana, in 1952, Boyd grew up there and in Nigeria. He was educated at Gordonstoun School and attended the universities of Nice (Diploma of French Studies) and Glasgow (M.A.Hons in English and Philosophy) and Jesus College, Oxford, where he studied for a D.Phil in English Literature.

He was also a lecturer in English Literature at St. Hilda's College, Oxford, from 1980-83. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 2005 he was awarded the CBE.

Professor Edmond Fischer was the co-recipient, with Edwin G. Krebs, of the 1992 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning reversible phosphorylation, a biochemical mechanism that governs the activities of cell proteins.

The pair's work at the University of Washington in Seattle in the 1950s and '60s became one of science's great partnerships and opened the way to a major new field of research suggesting how enzymes might function in various physiological processes, such as hormone regulatory mechanisms, gene expression, and fertilization of the egg. Their work also had major implications for the understanding of certain diseases including diabetes and asthma.

In the decades following their initial discoveries, scientists were able to identify many other enzymes that regulate specific processes in cells, leading to explanations of the mechanisms controlling basic activities in all living cells.

The impact of their work has been keenly felt in Dundee, where studies in the field of reversible phosphorylation in cell regulation and human disease form a large part of the local biotechnology sector.

Lord Foster of Thames Bank was born in Manchester in 1935. After graduating from Manchester University School of Architecture and City Planning in 1961 he won a Henry Fellowship to Yale University, where he gained a Master's Degree in Architecture.

He is the founder and chairman of Foster & Partners. Founded in London in 1967, it is now a worldwide practice, with project offices in more than twenty countries. Over the past four decades the company has been responsible for a strikingly wide range of work, from urban masterplans, public infrastructure, airports, civic and cultural buildings, offices and workplaces to private houses and product design. Since its inception, the practice has received 480 awards and citations for excellence and has won more than 86 international and national competitions.

He became the 21st Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate in 1999 and was awarded the Praemium Imperiale Award for Architecture in 2002. He has been awarded the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal for Architecture (1994), the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture (1983), and the Gold Medal of the French Academy of Architecture (1991). In 1990 he was granted a Knighthood in the Queen's Birthday Honours, and in 1999 was honoured with a Life Peerage, becoming Lord Foster of Thames Bank.

Sir Alec Jeffreys is a geneticist who developed the techniques used for DNA fingerprinting and DNA profiling, tools which have become invaluable in forensics for law enforcement, to resolve paternity and immigration disputes, and which can be applied to non-human species, for example in wildlife population genetics studies.

After graduating from the University of Oxford, he moved to the University of Leicester in 1977 where he developed genetic fingerprinting. DNA fingerprinting uses variations in the genetic code to identify individuals.

Sir Alec was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1986, declared Midlander of the Year in 1989 and was appointed as a Royal Society Research Professor in 1991. He was made a freeman of the City of Leicester in 1992 and was knighted in 1994. In 1996 he was awarded the Albert Einstein World Award of Science. He was awarded the Australia Prize in 1998. In 2004 he was awarded his D.Sc by the University of Leicester and the Royal Medal by the Royal Society.

In 2005 he won the Morgan Stanley Great Briton Award for the Greatest Briton of the Year.

Alan Johnston is an alumnus of the University of Dundee, having graduated from Dundee as part of the class of 1985 when he gained an MA Hons in English and Politics.

As a journalist and documentary maker, Alan Johnston has reported from some of the world's most volatile areas including the Gaza Strip and Afghanistan. Posted as the BBC's correspondent in Gaza for three years from 2004, he was kidnapped just two weeks before his contract was due to end and held for nearly four months by a Jihadi organisation called the Army of Islam.

The BBC mounted a major international campaign to try to secure his release, and he was eventually freed unharmed on 4 July 2007.

Lorraine Kelly is one of the country's best loved television presenters and journalists and a former Rector of the University.

She has enjoyed a long career at GMTV and currently has her own show LK Today. She has hosted and appeared on many other television programmes, presented her own network radio show, contributes weekly columns to two national newspapers, and made her own bestselling exercise videos.

Lorraine started her career in print journalism, joining her local paper the East Kilbride News straight from school. She rose to become Tv-Am's Scotland correspondent, covering major news stories including the Piper Alpha and Lockerbie disasters.

Lorraine was awarded the accolade of best new talent, by The Television And Radio Industry Club in 1991.

She was Rector of the University of Dundee from 2004 to 2007 and was hugely popular with the students. She has been a tireless supporter of many charity campaigns, particularly for cardiovascular research at the University of Dundee.

Lord Turnbull was appointed a Judge of the Court of Session and High Court of Justiciary in February 2006, becoming Scotland's youngest judge at the age of 47. He had previously been engaged as Principal Advocate Depute, Scotland's top prosecutor.

He attended Dunfermline High School and graduated from the University of Dundee in 1979. He was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1982 and took silk, becoming a Queen's Counsel in 1996. By 1988 he had come to be instructed as defence counsel in criminal cases and from then he has been mainly involved in criminal work and for some time specialised in fraud trials.

From 1995 to 1997 he served as an Advocate Depute appearing in the High Court of Justiciary and the Court of Criminal Appeal. In 1998 he was engaged as one of the two senior counsel leading the Crown team in the preparation for, and conduct of, the Lockerbie bombing trial, as well as appearing in the subsequent appeal proceedings.

In February 2001 he was appointed as Principal Advocate Depute - a position he held until his return to private practice in January 2006. He became Scotland's youngest judge, at the age of 47, in February 2006 when he was appointed a Judge of the Court of Session and High Court of Justiciary.

Dame Vivienne Westwood has been one of the world's most influential designers for more than 30 years. Her designs combine a fearless unconformity with a sense of tradition.

She is renowned for her gentle parody of Establishment styles, her use of very British fabrics such as Harris tweed and tartan and her re-use of historic garments such as the corset and crinoline. Fashion, she has said, was 'a baby I picked up and never put down.'

She was the first fashion designer to be profiled on the arts programme `The South Bank Show' and in 1990 and 1991 was named Fashion Designer of the Year by the British Fashion Council.

Dr. Walter Willett is Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition and Chairman of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Willett has focused much of his work over the last 25 years on the development of methods, using both questionnaire and biochemical approaches, to study the effects of diet on the occurrence of major diseases.

Dr. Willett has published over 1,000 articles, primarily on lifestyle risk factors for heart disease and cancer, and has written the textbook, Nutritional Epidemiology, published by Oxford University Press. His book for the general public, Eat, Drink and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating, has appeared on most major bestseller lists, and he has recently published a second book, co-authored with Mollie Katzen, for a general audience, Eat, Drink, and Weigh Less.

Dr. Willett is the most cited nutritionist internationally, and is among the five most cited persons in all fields of clinical science. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and the recipient of many national and international awards for his research.

Professor Alastair Wood graduated as Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MB ChB) from the University of Dundee Medical School in 1970.

After postgraduate training and serving as a lecturer and research fellow at Dundee University, Professor Wood moved to Vanderbilt University in the United States in 1976 as a research fellow in Clinical Pharmacology.

He was appointed assistant professor of Medicine and Pharmacology two years later, and quickly made his mark in the field of drug metabolism - understanding why patients respond differently to medications.

During the past 30 years, Professor Wood has written or coauthored more than 300 scientific papers and won numerous honours. He has been a member of and chaired National Institutes of Health study sections, served on the editorial boards of four major journals, and between 1992 and 2004 was drug therapy editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.

A candidate for the US Food and Drug Administration's commissioner's post in 2001, he served as a member of the FDA's Cardiovascular and Renal Advisory committee and also chaired the agency's Nonprescription Drug Advisory committee.

In 2000, Wood was appointed assistant vice chancellor for Research at Vanderbilt. He now holds a position on the management team of Symphony Capital LLC, a biopharmaceutical investment firm in New York.

Professor Margaret Wood is E. M. Papper Professor of Anaesthesiology at Columbia University Medical Centre in New York.

She graduated from the University of Dundee in 1970, carrying out her anaesthesiology training at both Ninewells Hospital and Dundee Royal Infirmary. In 1976 she moved with her husband Alastair to the United States to undertake fellowship training at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Margaret remained in Nashville for the next 20 years, eventually becoming Professor of Anaesthesiology. In 1996 she was appointed to her post at Columbia and made Chair of her department, the first time a woman had ever held the prestigious post.

Over the past three decades, she has published over 140 articles and book chapters and has lectured extensively on anaesthesia, drugs disposition and ageing and anaesthesia.

She and her husband have also co-authored two editions of the standard anaesthesia textbook, Drugs and Anaesthesia: Pharmacology for Anaesthesiologists.