The UAB to award honorary doctorates to Caddy Adzuba, Marie-Paule Kieny, Jaume Plensa, Joaquim Mª Puyal and Lisa Randall
03/05/2018
The UAB Governing Council recently approved the nominations of five new honorary doctors, who will receive the award as part of the celebrations of the UAB's 50 years of existence. The awardees are lawyer Caddy Adzuba, microbioligst and activist Marie-Paule Kieny, sculptor Jaume Plensa, journalist Joaquim Maria Puyal and theoretic physicist Lisa Randall. The exact dates of the ceremonies will be announced shortly.
The new honorary doctors represent five thematic axes covering different aspects of academic knowledge and commitment to society. Under the axis dedicated to freedom of expression, the honorary doctorate will go to Congolese lawyer Caddy Adzuba. She is known as an international speaker on the situation of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, especially on the topic of violence against women; she is a founding member of the network “A Loudspeaker for the Silence” and is a presenter at Radio Okapi, a United Nations' radio station broadcast in Congo. She has received several death threats and has survived two attempts on her life. Sponsoring Adzuba will be Gregorio Garzón, professor of international public law and international relations.
Under the axis of solidarity, the honorary doctorate will be awarded to researcher Marie-Paule Kieny, president of Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative. Dr Kieny works on the transfer of free patents resulting from her research in microbiology, focused on diseases which mainly affect populations in developing countries. She was also Assistant Director-General of the WHO and achieved to develop and yield licenses of new vaccines for pandemic diseases (malaria, zika fever and ebola virus). She will be sponsored by Tomás Pumarola, professor in microbiology.
The field of cultural identity will be represented by sculptor Jaume Plensa, the "most renowned living artist from Catalonia with art works on display in public areas". In his pieces, which also include the plastic and dramatic arts, Plensa “overthrows the concept of the "I" to convert it into "us" and thus transform what is established into what is still to become collectively”. He will be sponsored by Jèssica Jacques, professor of the Area of Art Aesthetics and Theory.
In commitment with the Catalan language and society, the honorary doctorate will go to Joaquim Maria Puyal, the first journalist to offer a football match on the radio in Catalan since the fall of the Second Spanish Republic in 1939, making it thus "an essential factor in normalising the Catalan language". Dr Puyal holds a degree in information science from the UAB and has covered more than 2,000 football matches, all the while creating his “very own language and way of using it in the genre”. He will be sponsored by Miquel de Moragas, professor emeritus of journalism.
Finally, in the knowledge axis, the honorary doctorate will go to Lisa Randall, specialist in the physics of particles and cosmology and a markedly transversal thinker who "has been able to relate the knowledge discovered in her field with philosophy, the humanities and music"”. Dr Randall became the first female professor of the Department of Theoretical Physics at Princeton and Harvard, she has worked on several string theory models to explain the way the universe works. She is also a well-known scienctific disseminator. Her sponsorer will be Àlex Pomarol, professor in theoretical physics.