Trinity is to confer honorary degrees on five individuals tomorrow, at a commencement ceremony in the Exam Hall.
Mary Frances Kelly, Beate Schuler, David Wallach, James Ivan McGuire and Deirdre McLoughlin are to be made honorary Trinity graduates.
The five names were circulated to staff and students today in an email signed by Registrar Neville Cox.
Honorary degrees are given to “individuals of integrity, judgment and exceptional achievement whose acceptance of an honorary degree would add lustre to this university”.
The conferring of an honorary degree acknowledges an individual’s outstanding contribution to scholarship, society, culture or civil society.
Mary Frances Kelly is a former Director General of the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as a former chair of An Bord Pleanála and vice-president of the Royal Irish Academy. Cox wrote that “she led the EPA through periods of great change including highlighting the issue of climate change”.
In 2018, Kelly led the third Women in Leadership Masterclass Series hosted by the Royal Irish Academy in which outstanding women in leading positions share their experience with younger women achievers. She was elected a Fellow of the Irish Academy of Engineering in 2017.
Beate Schuler is a philanthropist whose recent donations have gone towards projects such as Trinity’s Schuler Democracy Forum. A native of Germany, she spent her summers in Rathdrum in Wicklow and has close ties to Trinity and Ireland. She supports the Trinity Summer School for Chemistry for students from disadvantaged schools, which has a progression rate to Trinity programmes of nearly 40 per cent.
Cox said: “Her philanthropy is international in scope, with initiatives in Germany, Portugal and New Zealand as well as Ireland, and focuses particularly on education. She works tirelessly to promote links between Trinity and German schools and universities. Dr Schuler is a founding member of the Provost’s Campaign Cabinet, Provost’s Council and campaign advisor.”
David Wallach is a Professor of Molecular Biology at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. His research has focused on improving the lives of people with chronic diseases, for which he has won international awards such as the Rappaport Prize for Biomedical Research.
Cox said: “A student of Joyce and in particular Ulysses, he was instrumental in fostering closer links between Trinity and the Weizmann Institute, leading to active scientific collaborations and the exchange of scientists.”
Wallach organised two joint research conferences which hosted five Nobel Laureates in Dublin.
James Ivan McGuire is an adjunct professor in the school of history in University College Dublin (UCD), focusing on 17th-century Ireland, the Church of Ireland and historical bibliography and biography. He has been described as the driving force behind the nine-volume Dictionary of Irish Biography, a collection of almost 10,000 biographies by over 650 contributors. Cox said the dictionary is “of foundational significance for the study of Irish history”.
Deirdre McLoughlin is an Irish sculptor based in Amsterdam with an international reputation in abstract ceramics. She graduated from Trinity with a degree in philosophy, literature and history before moving to Kyoto. There, Cox said, “she developed her skill and aesthetic sense by immersing herself in the art of Sodeisha, a modernist movement using clay in abstract expression, culminating in a solo exhibition at the end of three years”.
Several of McLoughlin’s solo exhibitions have toured Ireland, and her work has been featured on an Irish stamp. She was twice the winner of the Ceramics of Europe Westerwald Prize in both cases for “illuminating the idea of the vessel as a work of pure sculpture”.
