Two honorary degrees to be awarded at GCU London

Students at GCU London will celebrate their graduation at Christ Church, Spitalfields, with two inspirational women from the worlds of fashion and finance.

The graduation ceremonies, which will take place on Monday, November 7, will celebrate academic awards across disciplines such as international banking, finance and risk management; and quantity surveying. It will also include students graduating from the British School of Fashion.

At the first ceremony, Christina Dean will receive an Award of Honorary Degree of Doctor of Business Administration. Christina is a waste-reducing sustainable fashion advocate who has been at the forefront of the sustainable fashion movement for more than 15 years.

She founded Redress, the NGO reducing fashion’s waste in 2007, and The R Collective social impact business that rescues, reuses and recycles textile waste in 2017. She has partnered with various leading global fashion businesses, from Net A Porter, Lane Crawford, Timberland, TAL Group, UPS to governments, academia and global leading suppliers.

Christina is listed by Asia Tatler’s The Impact List as one of the most influential individuals defining the future of Asia and she was listed by UK VOGUE as one of the UK’s ‘Top 30 Inspirational Women’.

Previously an award-winning journalist, Christina has written opinion pieces for CNN Style, Huffington Post, Modern Media and more, and she is quoted in VOGUE, BBC, New York Times, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, China Daily and more. She co-authored Dress (with) Sense, co-hosts the award-winning docu-series, Frontline Fashion, and her TEDx You are What You Wear has been widely viewed.

At the second ceremony, Katie Murray will also receive an Award of Honorary Degree of Doctor of Business Administration. Group Chief Financial Officer at NatWest, Katie is a role model for women in banking and has been instrumental in the sector’s response to climate change.

Katie, who has worked in finance and accounting for almost three decades, was a spokesperson at COP26 for NatWest, a principal partner of the global climate conference held in Glasgow in 2021.

In addition, she launched the group’s MoneySense Climate Savers Top Trumps competition, offering schools funding to develop their own climate change projects and an opportunity to showcase them to global leaders at the conference. She has also shared NatWest Group’s work driving action on climate change with industry leaders as a panellist at RacetoZero: How Finance Can Tackle the Climate Crisis.

A graduate of Glasgow College of Technology, one of the institutions that evolved into Glasgow Caledonian University, Katie is a champion of Mentoring, Internships, Networking and Talks (MINT), an innovative programme helping our students and graduates kick start their careers. She shared her expertise in our Captains of Industry lecture series and has lectured students in our Accountancy, Finance and Risk programmes.