An honorary doctorate is the recognition with which academia highlights the careers of outstanding individuals in their respective fields. The distinction honors both the recipient and the institution that grants it, by linking them with individuals who can be considered mentors. The University of La Laguna will once again confer this honor this Saturday, January 18th, at 11:00 a.m. investing in the Paraninfo to the writer Mariètou Mbaye Biléoma (Ken Bugul), the communicator Amparo Moreno Sardà, the science and gender specialist Londa Schiebinger, and the biomedical Nicholas A. Peppas.
The academic ceremony will be recorded and broadcast later and will begin with the reading by the Secretary General of the University of La Laguna, Juan Antonio García, of the agreement granting the Honorary Doctorate titles that will be awarded.
Next, there will be a series of words of praise (laudatio) of each of the four people invested, in charge of their respective godmothers and godfathers, who are the professors of the University of La Laguna who proposed and defended the candidacies for this distinction before the governing bodies of the center.
So, Dulce María González Doreste, from the Department of Classical, French, Arabic and Romance Philology, is Ken Bujul's godmother, along with Alba Rodríguez García, from the same department, and will read the presentation of the Senegalese writer; Lara Carrascosa Puerta, from the Department of Communication Sciences and Social Work, will honor Amparo Moreno Sardà; Carina Gonzalez Gonzalez, The Department of Computer and Systems Engineering will introduce the figure of Londa Schiebinger; and, finally, Edgar Pérez Herrero, from Chemical Engineering and Pharmaceutical Technology, will discuss the figure of Nicholas A. Peppas.
The ceremony will continue with the investiture of the three new doctoral graduates and the honorary doctorate recipient, who will take their oath of allegiance to the institution in the same order in which their respective laudatory speeches were read. Following this, each of them will deliver their inaugural address to the honorary faculty of the University of La Laguna.
Following a musical performance by Duo Tempus, the academic ceremony will conclude with a brief welcome speech to the new doctors.
Four eminent figures in science and culture
The Senegalese writer Ken Bugul She is the author of eleven novels. Her life is deeply marked by the uprooting of her family during early childhood. Her publisher gave her the pseudonym Ken Bugul, which in Wolof means ‘The one nobody wants’. She has traveled the world, years later, speaking about women's rights and family planning, promoting therapeutic writing and rehabilitation in vulnerable communities. Her humorous narrative style has earned her a distinctive voice in African literature. She writes in French, the language of her colonial upbringing, a tool that has allowed her to reach a wider audience, although her work focuses on the Wolof world.
Amparo Moreno Sardà She is a communication researcher and professor emerita at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. A feminist activist and researcher, she founded the Laboratory of Journalism and Communication for Citizenship and was one of the promoters of the Catalan Women's Days, which began while the Franco regime was still in power. Moreno Sardà wrote her doctoral thesis on the androcentric order of historical discourse, for which she received the Clara Campoamor Prize in 1984.
The researcher Londa Schiebinger She holds a doctorate from Harvard University and directs a project on gender innovation in science, medicine, engineering, and the environment. An international authority on gender and science, she has received honorary doctorates from the universities of Valencia, Lund (Sweden), and the Free University of Brussels, as well as numerous awards, including the Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Award, the National Institutes of Health Award, the National Society of Women Physicians Award, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Award, and the Stanford University Award.
The doctor Nicholas Peppas He is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, with affiliations in Chemical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Pharmacy, Pediatrics, and Surgery, and director of the Institute for Biomaterials, Drug Delivery, and Regenerative Medicine. He has been awarded more than 180 international prizes and is a pioneer in bionanomaterials, drug delivery and release, polymer physics, and bionanotechnology. He is the co-author of more than 1,800 articles (h-index of 216 and 224,601 citations), 41 books, and 54 patents, and has presented at conferences and congresses in 34 countries. He is widely recognized for his dedication to mentoring young researchers throughout their careers, having supported more than 1,500 researchers in various sources. He has been awarded 14 honorary doctorates.
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