Stagecoach founder Ann Gloag will receive an honorary degree from Dundee University next week.
The businesswoman and charity campaigner and Professor Nick Hastie, one of the UK’s leading researchers in the life sciences, will both receive degrees at the Winter Graduation ceremonies held in the Caird Hall on Thursday, November 20.
“Ann Gloag has had a hugely successful business career but has also been a major philanthropist who founded and supported hugely important charity projects in Africa and made significant donations closer to home here in Scotland,” said Professor Pete Downes, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University.
A native of Perth, she worked for 20 years as a nurse in Tayside before she helped establish Stagecoach as a company in 1980 with her brother Brian Souter.
She has also been a major philanthropist with strong personal involvement in projects she supports through The Gloag Foundation.
In Kenya, she funds and runs an orphanage, school and Women’s Rescue Centre. She runs a school for 200 children in the world’s largest slum, Kibera.
In 2008, she established the Freedom From Fistula Foundation, working in Sierra Leone, Kenya and Malawi, a charity for women left doubly incontinent and abandoned following childbirth.
In 2010, she helped open a maternity unit in Sierra Leone, and has helped establish a hospital in Malawi. Two hundred obsolete beds from Ninewells Hospital were transported to Malawi to help get the hospital established.
She was also patron of the successful £7.5 million appeal to support cardiovascular research in the University of Dundee and funded part of the Ninewells Maggie Centre.
Professor Nick Hastie is widely recognised as one of the leading UK researchers in the life sciences and as an international expert in human genetics and chromosome biology.
He is Director of the Medical Research Council Human Genetics Unit and the Institute of Genetics and Molecular Medicine in Edinburgh.