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Three Nobel laureates and 25 university leaders from across six continents are among a prestigious line-up of speakers confirmed for the Times Higher Education World Academic Summit in September.
Sir Paul Nurse, chief executive of the Francis Crick Institute and joint winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and Ada Yonath, director of the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly at the Weizmann Institute of Science and joint winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, will both speak at the event at King’s College London.
The summit, which takes place from 3 to 5 September 2017, will be on the theme “Collaborating for a better world: new models for research universities” and include debates on how universities can collaborate with their local communities and embrace inclusion.
Louise Richardson, vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, will deliver the opening keynote on how global partnerships can lead to international stability, while Sir Michael Barber, the chief education adviser at Pearson, who has been chosen by UK ministers to chair the planned Office for Students, will discuss how universities can maintain research excellence while widening participation.
Nicholas Dirks, who will step down as chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley in July, following his resignation last year, will speak about the challenges of university governance.
Ed Byrne, president and principal of King’s College London, said that the theme of collaboration fits with the university’s founding ethos, “to make the world a better place through working together across international boundaries to meet society’s needs and solve the complex problems facing global leaders today”.
There will also be a panel discussion on whether modern graduates are citizens of the world or citizens of nowhere featuring Peter Mathieson, president and vice-chancellor of the University of Hong Kong; Sabine Kunst, president of Humboldt University of Berlin; and Santa Ono, president of the University of British Columbia.
Other leading university speakers at the event include Ronald Daniels, president of Johns Hopkins University; Lino Guzzella, president of ETH Zurich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich; Ruth J. Simmons, emeritus president of Brown University; Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University; and Andrew Hamilton, president of New York University. Lord Browne of Madingley, the former chief executive officer of BP, is also confirmed to speak.
The event will feature the official launch of the THE World University Rankings 2017-18.
