Deputy Chief Medical Officer Awarded Honorary Degree by Bishop Grosseteste University
Professor Jonathan Van Tam, Deputy Chief Medical Officer for health protection in England, has been awarded an honorary degree by Bishop Grosseteste University
Over the course of a career that has seen him work within education, the public sector and the pharmaceutical industry Professor Van Tam has built a reputation for his knowledge and expertise and to this date has published over 190 peer-reviewed scientific papers and written multiple chapters in textbooks.
Professor Van Tam’s current role as Deputy Chief Medical Officer requires him to oversee a portfolio which covers vaccines, pharmaceuticals, health protection, and biosecurity. Through this he has been extensively involved in domestic vaccines policy, seasonal influenza, infectious disease incidents (Ebola, Monkeypox), the Novichok attacks, and, most recently the COVID-19 pandemic, including every aspect of the successful UK vaccine procurement and deployment programme which has brought him national recognition.
Speaking ahead of the ceremonies, Professor Van Tam expressed his pride at receiving the degree:
“I am humbled and privileged in equal measure to receive this recognition from one of my local universities. I was born and raised in Lincolnshire, a junior anaesthetist at Lincoln County Hospital, and I have a long association with the Lincolnshire Army Cadet Force. I am truly honoured.”
Choral expert and inclusive educator recognised with honorary degree
Susan Hollingworth GRSM ARMCM BEM was born in 1950 and, for most of her life, has lived in North Lincolnshire. She is a graduate of the Royal Northern College of Music and divides her time between being a choral conductor and a music educator. She believes passionately that everyone can be taught to sing and strives for choral excellence both within open access choirs, educational settings and more elite choirs. She enjoys training teachers to teach music and emerging choir leaders to conduct.
Within her conducting career she has worked with both adult and young choirs around the world including the Scunthorpe Cooperative Junior Choir with whom she sang at the opening of the Millennium Dome as well the Sydney Olympics before going on to win the 2008 BBC Choir of the Year Competition.
Her important work saw awarded in 2019 with a British Empire Medal for her services to music both nationally and within her own community.
Susan has also been an educator for many years, including 10 years as Director of Music at John Leggott Sixth Form College, and is currently part of a team trying to develop an App to help people learn to sing.
Founder of Lincolnshire Food Partnership Awarded Honorary Doctorate
Nigel Curry is a Founding Professor of the University of Gloucestershire and a Visiting Professor at the University of Lincoln. Born in 1951, he went to what is now the Oasis Academy in Grimsby and thence to Leeds University to read Economics, Newcastle University to read agricultural economics, and subsequently graduated with a PhD in Land Economy from the University of Cambridge.
His career-long research interests have cohered around equity. This has embraced studies of the distributional effects of a range of public policies, the ‘fairness’ with which resources are distributed, and means of poverty alleviation, particularly in respect of access to food. His teaching has focussed on rural development, including the development of the BBC television series, the Changing Countryside.
On moving to Lincoln in 2012, he determined to put into practice what he had formerly researched and taught. To this end, he set up the Lincolnshire Food Partnership to encourage the production and consumption of fairer, healthier, greener food. His interest in social economies has led him to serve on the boards of a range of other social organisations including the YMCA, the Mint Lane Café, Grimsby Community Energy, Involve@Lincoln, and Action with Communities in Rural England, to see how they might be better joined up into a social system. He co-authored the County’s Social Economy Strategy in 2020.
Nigel has held academic posts at the Open University, the University of Cambridge, the University of the West of England, the Queen's University of Belfast, the Institut d'Économie Rurale, Eidgenössishe Technische Hochschule, Lausanne, Switzerland, and Lincoln University in New Zealand. He has published five books on rural development, including a history of the Rural Community Councils – Reaping a Community Harvest - published in 2021. He has even found time to publish a book of humorous poetry and an album of songs. He is a Lincoln Climate Commissioner and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2020.
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