Honorary Degree Recipients

The University of Chicago traditionally confers the honorary doctor of divinity, doctor of humane letters, doctor of laws, doctor of music, and doctor of science degrees.

The University’s approach to awarding honorary degrees, however, is unique in that the University does not honor actors, ambassadors, presidents or monarchs unless they meet stringent requirements for scholarship. The University traditionally awards honorary degrees to individuals who have made significant contributions to their fields of study or in service to the University, in the case of those who have served as presidents of the University or chairmen of the Board of Trustees.

University faculty nominate candidates at the level of degree-granting units. Departmental honorary degree committees collect letters of recommendation from outside scholars as well as complete bibliographies of the candidates. They make their recommendations to the divisional committees, which then make their recommendations to the deans.

Sir Shankar Balasubramanian Image of Sir Shankar Balasubramanian

Sir Shankar Balasubramanian is the Herchel Smith Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and senior group leader at Cancer Research UK’s Cambridge Institute. He works on the chemistry, structure and function of nucleic acids.

He is a co-inventor (with Sir David Klenerman) of the leading next generation DNA sequencing methodology, Solexa sequencing (now Illumina) that has made routine, accurate, low-cost sequencing of human genomes a reality and has revolutionised biology. He has invented chemistry to decode several modified (epigenetic) DNA bases and DNA secondary structures (G-quadruplexes) in the genome and has made seminal contributions towards the understanding of their dynamics and function. His work on small molecule recognition of nucleic acids has revealed molecular mechanisms that can be exploited to modulate the biology of cancer. His collective contributions span fundamental chemistry and its application to the biological and medical sciences.

Sir Shankar was knighted in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours in 2017 for his services to science and medicine and awarded the Royal Society’s Royal Medal in 2018. In 2021, he was awarded the 2020 Millennium Technology Prize jointly with Sir David Klenerman and the 2022 Breakthrough Prize for Life Sciences jointly with Sir David Klenerman and Pascal Mayer for their work on sequencing technologies. In 2023, he was elected as an international member of the National Academy of Sciences and in 2024 he was awarded the Novo Nordisk Award with Sir David Klenerman and the Gairdner Prize in Life Sciences jointly with Sir David Klenerman and Pascal Mayer. In 2025, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Association of Cancer Research.

 

Image of Louis Kaplow Louis Kaplow

Louis Kaplow is Finn M.W. Caspersen and Household International Professor of Law and Economics at Harvard Law School, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has a Ph.D. in economics and a J.D. from Harvard University. He has published widely in the fields of taxation and public economics, antitrust, law and economics, and welfare economics and moral philosophy. He serves on editorial boards of numerous journals and has been an economic and legal consultant to government entities and private parties. He has received lifetime achievement awards for scholarship from the National Tax Association and from the American Law and Economics Association.

Notable publications include: (1) Antitrust: Rethinking Merger Analysis (MIT Press 2024), Competition Policy and Price Fixing (Princeton University Press 2013), as well as articles on antitrust and a text in the field; (2) Taxation and Public Economics: Optimal Income Taxation (Journal of Economic Literature 2024), The Theory of Taxation and Public Economics (Princeton University Press 2008), and a series of articles presenting a new framework for the analysis of taxation and related subjects in public economics; (3) Law and Economics: articles on a broad range of subjects, many on legal rules and the legal system; (4) Welfare Economics: Fairness versus Welfare (Harvard University Press 2002) (with Steven Shavell), an analytical argument and synthesis at the intersection of economics, moral philosophy, and law.

 

Image of Greg Woolf Greg Woolf

Greg Woolf has since 1st January 2025 been Leon Levy Director and Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Studies in the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU.

Previously he was Ronald J. Mellor Distinguished Professor at UCLA; before that Director of the Institute of Classical Studies at London; and before that Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews. He has degrees from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and has taught and held fellowships at both. He was born and brought up in the south of England and lived for twenty years in Scotland where he still spends part of each year.

He is a former editor of the Journal of Roman Studies and is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Roman Archaeology. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Societies of Antiquaries of Scotland and of London, and a Member of Academia Europea. He has held visiting position in Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States.

Woolf is interested in the very large-scale history of the Roman world and of antiquity in general. His published work typically combines historical and archaeological material with wider cultural and social theory. At present, he is writing on mobility and migration in the ancient world.

 

Past Honorary Degree Recipients

June 7, 2025
June 1, 2024
June 3, 2023
2022-2010
2009-2000
1999-1950
1949-1898