Is there a doctor in the Random House?

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Key figures from the worlds of publishing, music, mathematics and environmental politics will be collecting honorary degrees at the summer graduation ceremony on 11 July.

They will join some 1,600 students, plus family and friends, for the ceremony at the Brighton Centre, where University Chancellor, Lord Attenborough, will confer the awards.

Gail Rebuck (pictured right), chief executive of the UK's largest publishing company, the Random House Group, will become a Doctor of Letters.

For Ms Rebuck, a Sussex alumna and a member of the University's Court, the event will be a novel experience. "I didn't go to my own graduation in 1974," she recalled. "It just wasn't the thing you did in those days."

Ms Rebuck, who was awarded an Alumni Fellowship earlier this year, said that her four years of studying Intellectual History at Sussex were "incredibly exciting" and that the University's interdisciplinary teaching style had had a long-lasting effect on her career.

"If I hadn't gone to Sussex, I don't think I would have got into publishing," she said. "I run a creative company and I found the Sussex system encouraged creativity through treating individuals as such."

Internationally renowned composer Jonathan Harvey, who lives in Lewes, professed to being "touched" at the award of his Doctor of Music honorary degree.

Professor Harvey (pictured left) taught music at the University for 18 years, before leaving in 1995 to devote more time to composition. "I have so many fond memories of Sussex," he said.

"I came to Sussex from Southampton University and it was a liberation for me. Southampton had an excellent music department, but it was quite strict in its approach. Here I was able to meet students from other disciplines and hear different ideas."

Eminent mathematician John Ball will collect the degree of Doctor of Science. Professor Ball, who was a research student at Sussex from 1969 to 1972 and now holds a chair in Natural Philosophy at Oxford University, said: "I am delighted to receive this award from the university that taught me so much."

"When I came here, Professor David Edmunds' research programme on non-linear partial differential equations attracted me to the subject and I was lucky to become David's student."

Green campaigner Jonathon Porritt, former director of Friends of the Earth and now a director of Forum for the Future, said that he felt "very honoured" to be offered the degree of Doctor of Laws.

He added, "I much admire the constant pursuit of excellence at Sussex, particularly in my own areas of interest (environment and development), and I am delighted at the prospect of being more closely connected with the University in the future."