Durham, N.C. - Duke University will award five honorary degrees during its May 15 commencement exercises, Duke President Richard H. Brodhead announced Thursday.

The degree recipients will be environmental advocate John H. Adams, Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann, university president Freeman A. Hrabowski III, Chilean President Ricardo Lagos and humanitarian and former President of Ireland Mary Robinson.

Commencement, featuring an address by Lagos, will be held at 10 a.m. at Wallace Wade Stadium and is open to the public. The academic procession begins at 9:30 a.m.

In 1970, Adams co-founded and became executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting natural resources and improving the quality of the environment. In October 1998, he was named NRDC's president. Over the years, the NRDC has grown to now include more than 1 million members and activists, including lawyers, scientists and other experts.

Prior to his work at NRDC, Adams, a 1962 graduate of DukeLawSchool, served as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. He also has taught clinical environmental law at New YorkUniversity's School of Law for 26 years.

Adams has served on the President's Council on Sustainable Development (he completed his membership in 1999) and participated in EPA's Common Sense Initiative. He now serves on the board of the Open Space Institute (chairman), the WoodsHoleResearchCenter, the League of Conservation Voters and the Center for American Progress.

He is the recipient of numerous awards. In 1998, Adams was named one of National Audubon's 100 Champions of Conservation. He received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Duke in 1991 and the DukeUniversityLawSchool's Charles J. Murphy Award in 1992.

The 1981 Nobel laureate in chemistry, Hoffmann is the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters at CornellUniversity, where he has been engaged in teaching and research since 1965. His research interests are in the electronic structure of stable and unstable molecules, and of transition states in reactions.

Hoffmann also is a prolific writer and has been extremely active in communicating science to non-scientists. His poetry has appeared in four collections, the latest of which is "Soliton," and in many magazines, and has been translated into 10 languages.

He also writes essays, non-fiction and plays, many dealing with the creative and humanistic sides of molecular science. The 2001 play "Oxygen," by Hoffmann and Carl Djerassi, is not only about the discovery of oxygen, but what it means to be a scientist and the importance of the discovery process in science. It has had productions in Canada, England, Germany, Japan, Korea, New Zealand and the United States.

Hoffmann also presented the television course "The World of Chemistry," which has aired on many PBS stations and abroad.

Hrabowski has served as president of The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) since May 1992. The UMBC campus, with 12,000 students and 650 full-time faculty, combines undergraduate teaching with research and graduate education in the sciences, engineering, and public policy. UMBC also actively promotes economic development in the Baltimore region through its research, technology commercialization and strong connections with the corporate community and public agencies.

Hrabowski's research and publications focus on science and math education, with special emphasis on minority participation and performance. He is co-author of two books published by Oxford University Press: "Beating the Odds"(1998), focusing on parenting and high-achieving African American males in science, and "Overcoming the Odds"(2002), on successful African-American females in science.

He serves as a consultant to the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and universities and school systems nationally. He also sits on several corporate and civic boards.

Recent awards and honors include election to the AmericanAcademy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, the prestigious McGraw Prize in Education and being named "Marylander of the Year" by TheBaltimore Sun.

Lagos, who received a Ph.D. in economics from Duke in 1966, was elected in 2000 to a six-year term as Chile's president. He is Chile's third president since the nation's return to democracy.

After receiving his Ph.D. from Duke, Lagos returned to Chile and was set to become an ambassador in the Salvador Allende government when Allende was killed in a 1973 coup. After the coup, in which military strongman Augusto Pinochet came to power, Lagos went into exile in the United States, where he was a visiting professor for two years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and then an economist at the United Nations.

He returned to Chile in the 1980s, where he headed a coalition opposed to Pinochet and formed the Party for Democracy, which is now part of the ruling Concertacion alliance. After Chile's return to democracy in 1990, Lagos served as education minister and public works minister, working for educational reforms to improve access to education, as well as for improvements to the highway system.

Since being elected to a six-year term as president, Lagos has pushed to redress the human rights abuses of the Pinochet era and to improve the Chilean economy. He is regarded as a moderate leftist who has supported free trade and improved international relations.

When Robinson was elected President of Ireland in 1990, she was not only the country's first woman president, but one of only three female heads of state in the world. During her seven years as president, she placed special emphasis on the needs of developing countries, and was the first head of state to make humanitarian visits to famine-ravaged Somalia and post-genocide Rwanda.

She has received numerous honors, including the CARE Humanitarian Award in recognition of her efforts on behalf of Somalia.

In 1997, Robinson became the United Nations' High Commissioner for Human Rights. As High Commissioner, she gave priority to implementing the reform proposal of Secretary-General Kofi Annan to integrate human rights concerns in all the activities of the United Nations.

Today, she directs Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative, which has three institutional partners -- The Aspen Institute, ColumbiaUniversity and the International Council on Human Rights Policy. Among her current activities, Robinson is a professor of the practice at ColumbiaUniversity, chair of the Council of Women World Leaders, vice president of the Club of Madrid and honorary president of Oxfam International.