Olympic hero Sir Mo Farah to receive honorary degree from University of Oxford
He's one of nine to get the honour in June.
Sir Mo Farah is among nine people who are to receive an honorary degree from the University of Oxford.
Sir Mo was knighted in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to athletics. In 2010, he made history by becoming the first British athlete to run the 5,000m in under 13 minutes. During the 2011 season, he became Britain’s first 5,000m world champion. At the London 2012 Olympics, Sir Mo won Great Britain’s first Olympic gold in the 10,000m.
During the Encaenia ceremony on Wednesday 25 June, degrees will be awarded to Dame Jacinda Ardern, Lord Melvyn Bragg, Clive Myrie, Professor Serhii Plokhii, Professor Timothy Snyder, Professor Colm TóibÃn, Sir Mo Farah, Professor Robert S Langer and Professor Erwin Neher.
The Rt Hon Dame Jacinda Ardern served as the 40th Prime Minister of New Zealand (2017-2023). In the 2023 she was appointed a Dame Grand Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to the State. As Prime Minister she faced unprecedented challenges, including a live streamed terror attack on two Christchurch mosques, a volcanic eruption, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Lord Melvyn Bragg, CH, FRSL is a British broadcaster, author and parliamentarian. He was appointed a life peer in 1998, becoming Baron Bragg of Wigton in the County of Cumbria. In 1961, he joined the BBC as a trainee. Just a few years later he was appointed editor of BBC Two's first arts programme, New Release. In 1978 Lord Bragg became the editor and presenter of The South Bank Show. From 1988 to 1998, he hosted BBC Radio 4's Start the Week and now presents In Our Time (1998 to present).
Clive Myrie is a British journalist, newsreader and presenter. He studied law but chose to pursue journalism and became a trainee at the BBC in the late 80s. Clive joined BBC network news in 1992 as a correspondent based in London, before his first overseas posting to Japan in 1996. He has gone on to cover major global events and report from war zones around the world.
Professor Serhii Plokhii is a historian and author, widely recognised for his scholarship on Eastern Europe. He is the Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History and director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. Professor Plokhii was born in the Soviet Union. He spent much of his early life in Ukraine.
Professor Timothy Snyder is an American scholar of the history of Central Europe, Ukraine, the Soviet Union and the Holocaust. He holds the inaugural Chair in Modern European History, supported by the Temerty Endowment for Ukrainian Studies, at the University of Toronto, where he will begin teaching in the 2025-2026 academic year.
Professor Colm TóibÃn, FRSL is an Irish novelist, writer, journalist and academic. He currently serves as the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. Following his studies at University College Dublin, where he graduated in 1975 with a degree in English and History, Professor TóibÃn moved to Barcelona; an experience that later informed several of his books.
Professor Robert S Langer is an American chemical engineer, nanotechnologist, biologist, scientist and entrepreneur, known for his groundbreaking contributions to controlled drug delivery systems and tissue engineering, and is a cofounder of Moderna. Professor Langer is the David H. Koch Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Professor Erwin Neher is a German biophysicist renowned for his pioneering work in cell physiology. He was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1991 alongside Professor Bert Sakmann ‘for their discoveries concerning the function of single ion channels in cells’.