Yo-Yo Ma and others gain Honorary Degrees at Encaenia 2019

Encaenia is the ceremony at which the University of Oxford awards honorary degrees to distinguished men and women and commemorates its benefactors. It is held annually at the end of the summer ('Trinity') term.

Professor Jennifer A. Doudna is Professor of Chemistry and Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2012, she and her team made a major discovery of a simple way of editing the DNA of any organism –  CRISPR-Cas9

Professor Andrea Ghez is an astronomer and Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has uncovered the best evidence to date for the existence of supermassive black holes.

Professor Shafi Goldwasser is a computer scientist and the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She has made major contributions to the field, including the introduction of zero-knowledge interactive proofs, and has been the winner of the Turing prize.

Ustad Rahat Fateh Ali Khan is a Pakistani singer, primarily of Qawwali, a devotional music of the Muslim Sufis. He has sung more than fifty title tracks of television serials and over one hundred film songs in both Hollywood and Bollywood.

Mr Yo-Yo Ma is a world-renowned cellist His discography of over 100 albums, including 19 Grammy Award winners, includes renditions of the Western classical canon as well as music from genres and traditions from across the world.

Dr Cyrus Poonawalla is the Founder and Chairman of the Serum Institute of India. Founded in 1966, the Serum Institute is now the world’s largest manufacturer of life-saving vaccines by number of doses, producing more than 1.5 billion doses a year.

Professor Sir Simon Wessely is Regius Professor of Psychiatry at King’s College London and a Consultant Liaison Psychiatrist at King’s College and the Maudsley Hospitals.Sir Simon has particular interests in unexplained symptoms and syndromes, population reactions to adversity, and military health.

(Professor Daniel Kahneman could not attend the ceremony due to illness – he is Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton. He is best known for his work with Amos Tversky on human judgment and decision-making, for which he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2002.)