Ten Will Receive Honorary Degrees

Commencement keynote speaker Steven Chu will be among the 10 recipients of honorary degrees from the University this year, according to a program circulated at a dinner last night for the honorees. He will receive an honorary doctor of science degree.

Chu is a Nobel Laureate Physicist and the current U.S. Secretary of Energy. He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics for his work developing methods to cool atoms using laser light.

According to the program, he is a strong proponent of scientific solutions for climate change.

Honorary doctor of science degrees will also be given to AIDS researcher Anthony S. Fauci, anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy ’68, and MIT Bioengineering Professor Robert Langer.

Another honoree is Academy Award winning director and screenwriter Pedro Almodóvar, who will receive a doctorate of arts degree.

Almodóvar has won Academy Awards for best original screenplay and best foreign language film as well as Cannes Film Festival prizes for best director and best screenplay. His most recent work includes the 2001 film Talk to Her, and the 2006 film Volver.

Author Joan Didion will be the recipient of an honorary doctor of letters degree. In 2005, she received a National Book Award for her novel The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir she wrote following her husband’s sudden death.

She has also received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and the Gold Medal for Belles Lettres from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Jazz artist Wynton Marsalis will receive an honorary doctor of music degree. He has won nine Grammy awards and is the only person to receive a Grammy award for classical and jazz performances in the same year. In 1997, he became the first jazz musician to win a Pulitzer Prize for music, and in 2005 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

Wendy Doniger ’62, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, will also receive an honorary doctor of letters degree.

Ronald Dworkin ’53, the Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at New York University and Emeritus Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London, will receive an honorary doctor of laws degree. He is a 1957 graduate of Harvard Law School.

Sidney Verba ’53, Harvard’s Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor Emeritus and Director of the Harvard University Library between 1984 and 2007, will also receive an honorary doctor of laws degree.

—Staff writer Cara K. Fahey can be reached at cfahey@fas.harvard.edu.