The University of Chicago will award honorary degrees to three distinguished scholars on June 6 during its Convocation celebration of the Class of 2026: chemist Sir Shankar Balasubramanian, economic and legal scholar Louis Kaplow, and historian and archaeologist Greg Woolf.
Shankar Balasubramanian, the Herchel Smith Professor of Medicinal Chemistry in the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, will receive the honorary degree of Doctor of Science.
The senior group leader at Cancer Research UK’s Cambridge Institute, Balasubramanian researches the chemistry, structure and function of nucleic acids. Along with David Klenerman, he invented the DNA sequencing technology Solexa (now Illumina), which revolutionized biology and medicine and enabled the accurate, low-cost sequencing of human genomes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this technology was central to identifying the SARS-CoV-2 genome, tracking the emergence of variants and guiding updates of vaccines. He also has made fundamental contributions to the study of DNA structures and nucleic acids to help pioneer new therapies.
Knighted in 2017, Balasubramanian has received numerous honors, including the Royal Society’s Royal Medal, the Millennium Technology Prize, the Breakthrough Prize for Life Sciences, the Novo Nordisk Award and the Canada Gairdner International Prize in Life Sciences. He is a fellow of the Royal Society, an international member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Association of Cancer Research.
Louis Kaplow, the Finn M.W. Caspersen and Household International Professor of Law and Economics at Harvard Law School, will receive the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws.
Kaplow has made groundbreaking contributions to the study of law and economics, taxation and public economics, industrial organization and antitrust law, and welfare economics. His foundational work has employed formal and informal economic reasoning to analyze the effects of legal rules and institutions as well as to provide new conceptual frameworks that revise central legal and economic understandings. His most recent scholarship rethinks optimal income taxation, merger analysis, and competition regulation of dominant firms.
Kaplow is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received lifetime achievement awards for scholarship from the National Tax Association and from the American Law and Economics Association.
Greg Woolf, the Leon Levy Director and Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Studies in the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU, will receive the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.
Woolf is regarded as one of the world’s most distinguished scholars of ancient history, whose research greatly impacted our understanding of the Roman world and life within ancient empires. His pioneering work integrated archaeological data into the study of provincial cultures, and it used climate science, evolutionary theory and social anthropology in the history of urbanism. His first book, Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (1998), helped define the field of humanistic scholarship, addressing the history of cultural change in a province of the Roman empire. He is currently researching mobility and migration in the ancient world, and his latest book is entitled The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History.
Woolf currently serves as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Roman Archaeology and is a former editor of the Journal of Roman Studies. He is a fellow of the British Academy, of the Societies of Antiquaries of Scotland and of London, and a member of Academia Europea.
