New honorary doctors at the University

This year’s recipients of honorary doctorates will receive their tokens of honour at the Winter Conferment Ceremony on 31 January 2025. Many of them will also give a lecture during their visit to the University. The Conferment Ceremony is open to anyone interested and tickets can be booked online free of charge.

New honorary doctor at the Faculty of Arts

Professor Jon Stobart, of Manchester Metropolitan University, is a leading international scholar of early modern cultural history. Focusing on consumption, particularly in the 18th century, his work covers areas such as material culture, spatiality, social practices, gender history, urban history and global history.

Both his pioneering work in the history of culture and consumption and his strong commitment to international collaborations make him a valuable partner for the Faculty of Arts at Uppsala University.

New honorary doctor at the Faculty of Educational Sciences

Through her children's programmes in particular, Eva Funck Beskow has made a major contribution to children's education and quest for knowledge. Her work is characterised by her ability to explain in a clear and lucid manner phenomena ranging from human physiognomy and psychology to the qualities of nature and the structure of society. It is also characterised by her enthusiastic manner and scientifically inspired approach that encourages children to seek new knowledge themselves.

New honorary doctors at the Faculty of Languages

Helen Morales has been Argyropoulos Professor of Hellenic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara since 2012. Morales is a classical philologist with unusually broad interests: from ancient fiction and mythology to sexual ethics and literary criticism. She writes about the ancient world and its reception in modern times for both subject experts and the broader public, which puts her in a unique position to convey the diversity of antiquity and the power of tradition.

Without ever compromising on subject matter expertise, Professor Morales allows modern voices like Beyoncé to exemplify how the ancient world affects us today. Through books such as Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths (2020), Morales has thus become one of the decade’s most important voices in classical studies.

Thomas Steinfeld is a journalist and one of the main cultural mediators between Germany and Sweden. His new translation of Selma Lagerlöf's Nils Holgersson's Wonderful Journey through Sweden was published in German in 2014 to critical and popular acclaim. His other publications include a biography of Axel Munthe (2007, published in Swedish in 2009), but he has also shed light on educational issues (Bildningen på barrikaden. Ett manifesto [Education on the barricades. A manifesto], together with Per Svensson, 2017) and explained the IKEA phenomenon to Germans (together with Frederic Steinfeld, 2019).

Steinfeld has worked for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Süddeutsche Zeitung newspapers and was for several years the latter’s chief culture editor. He also writes for Swedish newspapers such as Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet and appears on Swedish Radio. In his publications, Steinfeld manages to combine the scholarly and the journalistic in a fascinating way.

New honorary doctor at the Faculty of Law

Johan Bärlund is Professor of Nordic Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki.

His main research areas are consumer protection, contract law, market law, tort law and personality law from a Nordic perspective, and several of his recent articles have dealt with Nordic contract law and marketing law.

Professor Bärlund’s main teaching areas are consumer law, contract law, market law and tort law, and previously also matrimonial law. He is an appreciated teacher who has actively worked to emphasise the importance of pedagogy for learning. He presents his views in the scientific dialogue with both gentleness and sharpness, which has made him a valued evaluator of dissertations throughout the Nordic region.

New honorary doctors at the Faculty of Medicine

Gerard M. Doherty is a specialist in surgery, with a particular focus on endocrine surgery. Since 2016, Dr Doherty has been Moseley Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and serves as the Crowley Family Distinguished Chair and Surgeon-in-Chief at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Faber Cancer Institute.

Professor Doherty is involved in the work on consensus statements and guidelines for endocrine tumours and has held leadership roles in many professional associations, including President of the American Association of Endocrine Surgeons (AAES) and President of the International Association of Endocrine Surgeons (IAES). For more than 20 years, he has collaborated closely with researchers at the Faculty of Medicine, enabling visiting professorships at both Harvard and Ann Arbour, thereby promoting scientific collaboration on clinical materials for rare diseases.

Hussein Kidanto is Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Aga Khan University, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Throughout his career, he has worked as an obstetrician alongside his research, establishing him as a recognised researcher of international relevance to practitioners and policy makers alike.

Professor Kidanto is a visionary advocate for the importance of higher education and research in international women’s and maternal health. He has been a pioneer in his focus on improving care for vulnerable women and newborns, demonstrating how clinical delivery practices and perinatal monitoring methods can be adapted for local, low-resource healthcare contexts across Africa. Professor Kidanto has given countless students a deeper understanding of the possibilities of conducting research and quality improvement work to achieve the UN’s global health goals in maternal and child health.

Raymond Schinazi is Professor at Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, and a world leader in nucleoside chemistry in antiviral drug discovery. His research has focused on developing treatments for infections caused by viruses. He holds over 100 US patents, resulting in 22 new drug applications.

Professor Schinazi is best known for his ground-breaking work on drugs for HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C. More than 80 per cent of patients treated for HIV take at least one of the medications he has developed. Professor Schinazi has founded several biotechnology companies focused on the discovery and development of antiviral therapies. He is internationally recognised as one of the most influential figures in life sciences, with an outstanding impact on global health.

New honorary doctors at the Faculty of Pharmacy

Pharmacist Dag Larsson is Senior Policy Advisor at Lif. He is also Chair of the National Coordination Function for ATMP, whose mission is to promote collaboration between academia, industry and healthcare to ensure new innovative treatment methods reach patients. Over the years, he has held numerous leadership roles in the pharmaceutical industry and is a sought-after, award-winning lecturer, future analyst and debater. He is renowned for his outstanding ability to highlight critical perspectives from the entire drug development process – from concept to patient.

Through his involvement as an external adviser and active alumnus at Uppsala University, Dag Larsson has generously shared his expertise with the Faculty, which has had a positive impact on both education and research.

Lynne Taylor works at Purdue University in Indiana, where she is Professor of Industrial and Physical Pharmacy and Professor of Chemical Engineering. She is a world-leading researcher at the interface of pharmaceutical physical chemistry and galenic pharmacy, with a research programme focused on better understanding the interactions between molecules in drug formulations.

Professor Taylor addresses classical, fundamental scientific questions while conducting research of the utmost importance to the pharmaceutical industry. Her ability to work at the interface between academic research and drug development has meant that her models and techniques have been rapidly transferred and applied in the pharmaceutical industry.

New honorary doctors at the Faculty of Science and Technology

Professor Göran Sandberg has a very solid scientific career with a PhD from SLU Uppsala in 1981, several years of experience as an international postdoc, experience as a professor at SLU Uppsala and at Umeå University, vice-chancellor of Umeå University, and executive member of the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (KAW) 2010-2023.

His visionary work has made KAW the funding body in Sweden where excellence is most evident. KAW is at the very top of the world's leading and most prestigious research funding organisations, which must be attributed to Göran Sandberg's determined efforts to identify excellence in the research community and to identify tools to fund this research.

Catharina Stroppel is a famous German mathematician, one of the world leaders in the area of representation theory. She has a longstanding collaboration with Uppsala University, the results of which form a significant part of her scientific achievements.

Professor Stroppel has made major contributions to the development of modern representation theory, especially that of Lie algebras and superalgebras, diagram algebras and higher categories.

Dr Vittal K. Yachandra is a biophysical chemist and spectroscopist who has made outstanding contributions to the development of X-ray spectroscopy at synchrotrons and to serial femtosecond crystallography and X-ray spectroscopy at X-ray free electron lasers (XFELs).

Dr Yachandra’s work has pushed the boundaries of both our understanding of photosystem II and of the capabilities of large-scale facilities. His achievements will have long-lasting effects in the chemical, physical and biological communities working with synchrotrons and XFELs, and are highly important for the development of bio-inspired, scalable catalysts, made of earth-abundant elements, urgently required for the transition to a fossil-free society.

Dr William Shafarman, University of Delaware, USA, has had various types of collaboration with Uppsala University over the years.

Dr Shafarman´s research group investigates materials, processing, and characterisation of compound semiconductors for their application in thin film solar cells and related optoelectronic applications. The main objective of this research is to explore the complex relationships between processing, materials properties, device design, and electronic characteristics of solar cells.

New honorary doctors at the Faculty of Social Sciences

Anette Mikes is based at Saïd Business School and Hertford College, University of Oxford. Her research has greatly contributed to the development of a key area of the accounting and financial management literature, namely risk management. In this area, she is a pioneer with her in-depth case studies from the financial sector.

With her focus on man-made disasters, Dr Mikes’s research has expanded in recent years to include ethics and sustainability. She has also uniquely contributed to building bridges between academia and practice. This is evident, among other things, in her work and contribution in establishing “The Oxford Ministry for the Future”. The aim of this initiative is to create a multidisciplinary network of academics and practitioners who together influence the conversation about climate change and how society should address this problem.

Professor Steven C. Hayes's work has contributed enormously to establishing evidence for the importance of placing mental distress in a specific context that is unique to the individual. Through his theoretical and psychotherapeutic contributions, behavioural science and psychology today have begun to place greater focus on the experiences of individuals, as a way to better understand well-being and performance in the individual and in society, and as a way to design better treatments. In psychology, this is called a process-focused approach, known as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

Thanks to Professor Hayes's contributions to psychology, along with advances in technology, we can now collect complex, time-intensive data, analyse it in such a way that we can incorporate what people care about most into treatment, and use this information to customise treatment to focus on exactly what needs to change.

During his long career as a publisher, Torgny Wadensjö has had a major impact on Swedish social science research. Through his work, he has promoted the dissemination of social science literature as well as actively contributed to creating a platform for scientific discussion and debate. His eye for quality and relevance has meant that important research results have reached a wider audience, which has strengthened the understanding of complex social issues and contributed to a more informed public.

By promoting and disseminating research-based books, Torgny Wadensjö has facilitated a wider application of social science insights in both policy and public discourse. His ability to identify and publish works of great societal significance has made him a central figure in communicating research findings to policy makers, journalists and the interested public.

New honorary doctor at the Faculty of Theology

Professor Grzymała-Moszczyńskas is an internationally recognised researcher in the psychology of religion and has made significant contributions to understanding how religion affects people's lives, especially in the context of migration. Her research has contributed to a better understanding of the complex consequences of migration.

Among her many books and articles are a handbook on psychological support in working with refugees, resilience and religious coping among refugees who have experienced trauma, and return among Polish migrants.

Anders Berndt