Honorary Graduates 2026
This year, the University will honour some of its alumni, notable individuals from the South West area and key figures who have made a significant contribution within their field and to society, nationally and internationally. Read our news story Finisterre founder and ShelterBox Chief Executive honoured by the University of Exeter.
Steve Morgan CBE (LLD)

Monday 13 July 2026 11:45am
Steve Morgan CBE is an entrepreneur, philanthropist and Chairman of Bridgemere. At the age of 21 he established Redrow, which he grew to be a FTSE 250 company and one of the UK’s most successful homebuilders.
Steve stepped down as Chairman of Redrow in 2019 having guided the business to record levels of trading and profitability, with a turnover of £2.1 billion and profit before tax of £406 million. During his time as Chairman, Redrow built around 110,000 homes, housing a similar population to that of Nottingham.
In 1992 Steve received an OBE for Services to the Construction Industry and, in 2016, received a CBE for Philanthropic Services.
Steve’s private business, Bridgemere, has interests in healthcare, property, home building, hotels and aviation. Steve also owned Wolverhampton Wanderers from 2007 to 2016.
In 2001 he set up the Steve Morgan Foundation, which is now one of the UK’s largest charitable foundations. The Foundation’s mission is to deliver social change to improve the lives of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged. Over the years, Steve has been responsible for donating £0.5 billion between his personal donations and that of the Steve Morgan Foundation, making him one of the UK’s leading philanthropists.
Andrew Moreman (LLD)

Tuesday 14 July 2026 9:00am
From grassroots rural youth projects in Wiltshire to leading youth services across the UK and internationally, Andrew Moreman (Andy) has built a career working alongside young people to create the support they need to grow and thrive.
Since 2017, he has been Chief Executive of Young Devon, a leading charity supporting young people across the county. With more than three decades of experience, Andy has held senior leadership roles in local authority youth services in Kent, Sussex, Hackney and Melbourne, and has led voluntary sector organisations in Lambeth and Sussex.
Originally qualifying as a youth worker in the late 1990s, Andy has maintained a strong interest in how people learn and develop. This led him to complete a Masters degree in Psychology in 2023, which now informs his approach to shaping services and support for young people at Young Devon.
Alongside his executive role, Andy remains committed to social justice and widening opportunity. He has volunteered with Children in Need and served as a founding commissioner of the South West Social Mobility Commission. Outside of work, Andy enjoys running across Devon (sometimes literally), experimenting with baking and trying to keep up with the latest activities of his three sons.
Luis Juste OBE (LLD)

Tuesday 14 July 2026 3:00pm
Luis Juste OBE born in Avila (Spain), is an Economist graduated from the Universidad CEU San Pablo (Madrid), and from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He completed an MA in Economics at University College in Dublin.
His professional career in the Santander Group began in 1989. He has since held several management positions in corporate banking and finance internationally. In 2000, he implemented the global initiative Santander Universities in 11 Ibero-American Countries. The initiative partners with universities and focuses on education, employability and entrepreneurship. In 2007, he moved to the London to roll out Santander Universities in the UK; encouraging cultural exchange between the Ibero-American countries and the United Kingdom. He then continued and extended his work with Santander Universities from Madrid.
In 2016, he was awarded with an OBE for services to higher education. He also has honorary doctorates from Cass Business School and Lancaster University.
Since 2017, Luis has worked on new projects in education, finance and consulting in different companies such as Dádoris Foundation, London School Advice, Real Academia de Gastronomía, Siervas de San José and Fundación Hispano Británica together with coaching young students on their journey through university.
Luis has been married for 35 years and has five children and three grandsons. His wife and children have always been his source of inspiration and great support.
Iwona Blazwick OBE (DLitt)

Friday 17 July 2026 11:45am
Iwona Blazwick is a curator and writer. Formerly Director of the Whitechapel Gallery, Head of Exhibitions and Displays at Tate Modern and Director of Exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, she has curated numerous solo surveys of living artists and group shows of modern and contemporary art around the world. They have included the first exhibitions in the UK of artists including Zarina Bhimji, Peter Doig, Damien Hirst, Jenny Holzer, Lee Miller, Cornelia Parker, Barbara Kruger and Alice Neel. Important group exhibitions include Century City at Tate Modern; A Short History of Performance, The Adventures of the Black Square and Action! Gesture! Paint! The Women of Abstract Expressionism at the Whitechapel Gallery. At Tate Modern she inaugurated the Turbine Hall Commissions and a radical new approach to the display of its collection moving away from chronology to theme. Iwona also established the Max Mara Art Prize for Women and serves on the advisory committee for the Fourth Plinth in London.
She is curating a 65 square kilometre open air museum of Land Art in AlUla and is co-curator of Sculpture in the Garden: The Storytellers at Worcester College, Oxford and has curated numerous international art in the landscape projects including A Thousand Doors and Terrapolis in Athens. Blazwick was founding editor of Phaidon Contemporary Artists monographs and Whitechapel Gallery/ MIT Documents of Contemporary Art. Her writings on the art and artists of our time have been published worldwide. In 2007, Iwona was awarded an OBE for services to art.
Charles Landry (LLD)

Monday 20 July 2026 9:00am
Charles Landry is a prominent figure in city development and innovation. Best known for authoring The Creative City: A Toolkitfor Urban Innovators and The Art of City Making; these publications revolutionised the approach to city planning and management. His extensive work reimagines city-making by exploring the nomadic world, intercultural cities, cultural resources and the creative economy, the psychology of urban spaces, risk and fragility, creative bureaucracies, and the measurement of creativity.
His career has focused on how to harness the collective imagination and intelligence and to rethink, replan and act differently. He established Comedia, a think tank, publisher and consultancy in 1978. He has worked all around the world with cities at differing scales and with international institutions such as the United Nations Development Programme, the World Bank and UNESCO.
He has chaired various award schemes, such as the Human City Design Award and Actors of Urban Change; and is chair of the BMW Foundation’s RISE Cities Sounding Board. In 2018 he co-founded the Creative Bureaucracy Festival in Berlin.
Jamie Buchanan-Dunlop (DSc)

Friday 24 July 2026 11:45am
Jamie Buchanan-Dunlop studied history before beginning his career as a humanities teacher. During his teaching years, he developed virtual expedition projects connecting young people in the UK, the Middle East and Pakistan — an early experiment in using technology to close the distance between classrooms and the world.
That instinct took him first to Antarctica, where he brought live video updates directly into schools, and then to the Arctic, joining a team of marine scientists studying changes in the sea ice and the ocean beneath it. A month on the ice changed everything. He returned with a new understanding of the ocean and a commitment to bringing that world into classrooms.
These experiences became Encounter Edu, formerly Digital Explorer, now one of the world’s leading platforms for ocean and climate education, delivering programmes across all seven continents, from the polar regions to coral reefs. His work has reached fourteen million students in 91 countries, connecting young people with marine science expeditions, climate research and the human stories of our changing planet.
A committed advocate for ocean literacy, he led the coalition that secured the inclusion of ocean topics in the National Curriculum for the first time and has contributed to UN Ocean Literacy initiatives at an international level. He also pioneered the use of live lessons from remote field locations and 360-degree virtual reality, bringing these environments directly into classrooms around the world.
Tom Kay (LLD)

Saturday 25 July 2026 9:00am
Tom Kay is the founder of Finisterre, a brand that he started in 2003 from his flat above a surf shop in St Agnes, Cornwall. Born from the needs of British cold-water surfers, Finisterre has always made hard-wearing, fit-for-purpose gear in a more responsible way, for those that share its love of the sea.
With a pioneering take on innovation and sustainability, which can be found throughout its product line, the brand is steered from its clifftop HQ in St Agnes and now has sixteen stores across the UK.
Tom is proud of Finisterre’s journey, remaining true to its founding commitments to product, environment and people. The brand has been a B Corp certified business since 2018.
Sanjayan Srikanthan (LLD)

Saturday 25 July 2026 11:45am
Sanjayan Srikanthan (Sanj) is the Chief Executive of the international disaster relief charity, ShelterBox.
Before joining the ShelterBox Team in December 2019, he worked at the International Rescue Committee (IRC) for 10 years where he progressed to Senior Vice President for Europe. Prior to working at the IRC, Sanj transitioned from a career spending six years as a Captain in the British Army.
Sanj has been leading teams in adversity over the last two decades; from peacekeeping operations on the Iran-Iraq border, to responding as a humanitarian to Ebola outbreaks in Liberia, the conflicts in Syria, Mali and South Sudan, as well as disasters such as the Haiti earthquake in 2010.
He holds a Master of Public Administration from Columbia University and a Master of Public Affairs from Sciences-Po, Paris. Sanj splits his time between his home in Cornwall and international travel to many of the locations where ShelterBox continues to work to ensure no one is without shelter after disaster.