Professor Chris Day, Vice-Chancellor and President of Newcastle University, said: "These honours recognise the incredible talent, expertise and dedication of our University colleagues. It gives me great pleasure to see their outstanding work and achievements acknowledged in this way.” 

Those at the University are honoured for their services to the arts, children and young people and medical advances to benefit patients.

Imtiaz Dharker, Chancellor of Newcastle University, OBE

Imtiaz Dharker is a renowned poet, artist and video film-maker. She has been honoured for services to the Arts.

Imtiaz became Chancellor of Newcastle University in 2020. She was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014 for her poetry collection Over the Moon.  A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Imtiaz has been Poet in Residence at Cambridge University Library and has worked on several projects across art forms in Leeds, Newcastle and Hull, as well as the Archives of St Paul’s Cathedral.

Her seven poetry collections including the latest, Shadow Reader, are published by Bloodaxe Books. Her poems are included in  A-Level and GCSE English syllabuses and have been broadcast widely on BBC Radio 3 and 4 as well as the BBC World Service. She has had eleven solo exhibitions of drawings around the world, and scripts and directs video films, many of them for non-government organisations working in the area of shelter, education and health for women and children in India.

Professor Liz Todd, Professor of Educational Inclusion, OBE

Liz Todd is Professor of Educational Inclusion in Newcastle University’s School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences. She was honoured for services to children and young People. She  said: “This is an amazing honour for all the people I work with that are passionate about achieving change for social justice with and for our communities. This includes people in many Universities across the world, my fellow trustees and partners in the West End Children’s Community, and the leadership group and partners in Tyne and Wear Citizens.”

Professor Todd has spent her career endeavouring to make life fairer for children and young people. She took an untraditional route into academia, first working as a teacher and then as an educational psychologist and completed her PhD in her early 40’s, bringing  life experience and her work from various professional settings into her university work. Her research focuses on helping school pupils and young people overcome barriers, in particular, those caused by poverty and disadvantage.

Professor Todd was part of the initial development of Children North East’s Poverty Proofing scheme, a ground breaking approach to tackling the impact of poverty on children in schools. Her research into poverty proofing has been central to it being taken up by schools across the country and its overall impact. She is a member of Child Poverty Action Group’s anti-poverty education coalition which lobbies to end child poverty.

In 2015, she led Newcastle University to help establish a new chapter of Citizens UK - Tyne and Wear Citizens - in the North East. As low income is major cause of child poverty, Liz has campaigned for a real living wage for the last decade through Citizens. As a result, Newcastle University has been integral to the broader campaign of working towards Newcastle becoming a living wage place, more than quadrupling the number of accredited living wage employers in the city.

Professor Todd’s research over the last three decades has demonstrated the positive impact schools which work more deliberately as part of their communities have on children and families.  This includes her research into extended schools and children’s out of school activities. As a founding trustee of the West End Children’s Community in Newcastle since 2022,  her work shows how bringing schools and other organisations together in a local area leverages new resources for children and builds community leaders.

Her work also gives young people the opportunity to be heard. During the pandemic, the VOICES project, which she led and carried out jointly with charity Children North East, spoke to more than 1,700 children across the North East, making it the most comprehensive account of what life was like for them during Covid 19.

She is now helping to carry out a European project called SCIREARLY funded by HORIZON EU across nine countries looking at preventing early school dropout to give children the best possible chance to succeed at school.

Professor Todd is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Science and received an Academic Distinction Award from Newcastle University in 2022. She is also a trainer in video interaction guidance, an intervention being used internationally including in most Family Hubs across England and she co-edited two of the leading books in Video Interaction Guidance. In her spare time she goes on cycling expeditions and develops her artistic practice in drawing and printing.

Christine Harrison, Emerita Professor of Childhood Cancer Cytogenetics, OBE

Christine Harrison (Britch) is Emerita Professor of Childhood Cancer Cytogenetics in the Faculty of Medical Sciences.  She has been honoured for services to children with acute leukaemia.

She said: “I am delighted to be selected for this prestigious award in the New Year 2025 honours in recognition of my research into childhood leukaemia. I especially thank my team over the years for their devoted support. It would not have been possible without them.”

Professor Harrison is a Trustee of Blood Cancer UK and has led the Leukaemia Research Cytogenetics Group, now located in Newcastle University, for almost 30 years. She is a Fellow of both the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Royal College of Pathologists.

The ultimate aim of her research, spanning 45 years, has been to understand the role of genetics in improving the survival of leukaemia patients. This goal has been achieved through leading national and international research studies into the chromosomes (cytogenetics) and genetics of blood cancers.

She was responsible for the creation of a database for the cytogenetics of acute leukaemia in 1988, when the importance of chromosomal abnormalities in understanding risk levels for treatment was becoming evident. This has developed into a large-scale collection of cytogenetic and genetic data, containing information on more than 35,000 UK patients. It is renowned as one of the best leukaemia genetics research resources in the world. Some analyses from these data have identified new genetic-based risk categories in childhood and adult acute leukaemia, which have changed the way patients are treated.

Professor Harrison has a passion for implementing new technologies in her research. Their integration into routine practice within UK and international clinical trials has led to significantly improved survival for many patients.

Alison Pamela Murdoch, Professor of Reproductive Medicine, MBE

Alison Pamela Murdoch, Professor of Reproductive Medicine, has been awarded an MBE.

During her career, Professor Murdoch has helped hundreds of people become the parents they so desire and has now been recognised in the King's New Year Honours for a career dedicated to fertility research.

More than three decades ago, she established the Newcastle Fertility Centre which has provided outstanding fertility services to patients in the North East and further afield. Since 1999 the service has been based at the Centre for Life.

Professor Murdoch's illustrious career has seen her work as Head of Department at the University and as a consultant gynaecologist at the Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

Her international reputation has enabled her to lead the national debate on ethical, political and regulatory issues surrounding embryo research. She has been instrumental in pioneering new discoveries and was part of a team that developed the first embryonic stem cell line in the UK and the first team in the world to be granted a licence to carry out nuclear transfer for therapeutic cloning.

Professor Murdoch, who is now retired, was influential in the development and Parliamentary approval of mitochondrial donation, allowing mothers with a mitochondrial disorder to have their own children by moving the nucleus of their embryo to a donor embryonic cell with healthy mitochondria.

She has just concluded her term as President of the British Fertility Society and is working on a case to put to Government to revise the law on IVF, which she says is significantly out of date and does not reflect modern society.

Speaking to the Hexham Courant, Professor Murdoch said: “When the law was brought in in 1990, it assumed the only people who were going to have babies were married, heterosexual couples. It's not like that now, we have much more mixed, modern families - sometimes with two or more parents and mixed-gender parents.”

She said she was “very grateful” to those who nominated her for a King's honour.