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  • Prof Karen I. Barnes is a professor of clinical pharmacology at the University of Cape Town, with research interests focusing on improving the treatment of malaria. This includes translational research on the clinical pharmacology of antimalarials in vulnerable target populations (young children, pregnant women, those with prevalent co-morbidities such as HIV and malnutrition).

    She has conducted comprehensive evaluations of changes in malaria treatment policy, including from monotherapy to artemisinin-based combination therapy for treating uncomplicated malaria, from injectable quinine to injectable artesunate for the treatment of severe malaria and single low dose primaquine for malaria transmission blocking. She supports the development of much-needed novel antimalarials through the conduct of clinical trials including the Phase 1 First-in-Human study on MMV048 and drug-drug interaction studies.

    Prof Barnes is the Founding Director of the MRC Collaborating Centre for Optimising Antimalarial Therapy (CCOAT), and is co-chair of the South African Malaria Elimination Committee and the WHO TDR Scientific Working Group on Research for Implementation. She leads the Pharmacology Scientific Group of the WorldWide Antimalarial Resistance Network (WWARN) and is a member of the WHO Guidelines Development Group on Malaria Chemotherapy. She is a member of ASSAf and a fellow the UCT College of Fellows.

  • Prof Catherine Burns is an Associate Professor of Medical History in Africa, and is based in the Centre for Health Science Education, the Department of Family Medicine & Primary Care, and the Adler Museum of Medical History at WITS.  She worked with UCT and UKZN colleagues on the first medical humanities interdisciplinary programme in the Southern African region, and she continues to develop this field.  She was educated at WITS, and then Johns Hopkins University in medical history; later she earned her PhD at Northwestern University, in African History.

    Her research and publication interests focus on gender relations, women and health history; medical and health history; the history and ethnography of reproduction and sex and ethics in biomedical research. She is finishing a biography of a midwife and herbalist from the Eastern Cape, Louisa Mvemve; she has just published a history of gynaecology and obstetrics in Johannesburg and  finished a study of breastfeeding in Southern Africa, published by UCL Press; and she is completing a jointly written history of South Africa’s leading HIV programme, the Sinkithemba Centre, at the McCord Hospital in Durban.

    She is a deeply committed mentor to emerging scholars and interdisciplinary cohorts, and she has co supervised or supervised across many humanities, social science and scientific fields. She has work as a Commissioner (one of 18) with the UN Rapporteur on the Right to Health, Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng.

  • Professor Kelly Chibale is the Neville Isdell Chair in African-centric Drug Discovery & Development and Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Chibale is the founding Director of the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) Drug Discovery & Development Research Unit at UCT and the Founder and Director of the UCT Drug Discovery and Development Centre (H3D) and is the Chairman and CEO of the H3D Foundation.

    He is also a Full Member of the UCT Institute of Infectious Disease & Molecular Medicine and a Tier 1 South Africa Research Chair in Drug Discovery. In 2018 Professor Chibale was recognized by Fortune magazine as one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders and in 2019 he was named as one of the 100 Most Influential Africans by New African magazine.

  • Professor Robin Crewe is a research associate in the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship and professor of Zoology and Entomology at the University of Pretoria. He is an emeritus vice-principal and a member of the Social Insects Research Group (SIRG). He is a former President of the Academy of Science of South Africa.

     

    He has worked for many years on chemical communication and social organization in a variety of social insects. His current research is on social organization in the Cape honey bee and early beekeeping in the Cape Colony in the 19th century. He has held an NRF rating continuously for 39 years and has a B1 rating.

     

    He is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa, a fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa, a fellow of the African Academy of Science, and a fellow of the World Academy of Science. He is a Foreign Associate of Hassan II Academy of Science and Technology in Morocco and was awarded the Gold Medal of the Zoological Society of South Africa and is an honorary life member of the Entomological Society of southern Africa. He was the recipient of the Harry Oppenheimer Research Award for 2012 and received the Gold Medal of the Academy of Science of South Africa in 2013.

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  • Dr Francì Cronjé is a Cape Town-based educator, researcher, and academic, holding a doctorate in Media Studies (UCT) and two master’s degrees: one in Fine Art (Wits) and the other in Teaching & Learning in Higher Education (Cum Laude) (SU).

    She is a Research Associate at The IIE Vega School, where she also supervises several Master’s candidates. Firmly rooted in Critical Thinking, Media Studies, and postgraduate teaching and learning, research interests include Online Learning, Multimodal Discourse analysis, and Border Crossing identity theory.

    Her own postgraduate study and supervision experience fuels her to express her passion for academic writing by helping postgraduate students as an academic development editor. The motivational aspect of this role also cements her commitment to the FPP programme where she acts as an editor and Teaching and Learning consultant as part of the NRF application process.

  • Prof Johannes Cronjé is a professor of digital teaching and learning and the former dean of the Faculty of Informatics and Design at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology.  He started his career as a schoolmaster at Pretoria Boys High School, then became a lecturer in communication at Pretoria Technikon, and later a professor of Computers in Education at the University of Pretoria.

    He holds two master’s degrees and a doctorate from the University of Pretoria, and was visiting professor at universities in Norway, Finland, Sudan, Ethiopia and Belgium. He has supervised more than 75 Masters and 65 doctoral students and has published more than 45 academic articles and chapters in books. He holds a C1 rating from the South African National Research Foundation,

    His research interests focus on how people learn from one another using technology. In particular his research and post-graduate supervision over the last few years has concentrated on how Web 3.0 technologies have caused a paradigm shift in the focus of learning from the individual to the system. As such his interest lies in the “Rhizomatic” nature of learning that has become increasingly facilitated by mobile learning. Recommender systems form an integral part of such learning as they both depend on and contribute to the rhizomatic learning system.

    In 2008 he won the African ICT Achiever award in the category Teaching and Learning, and in 2015 he was a visiting scholar at the KU Leuven on an Erasmus Mundus scholarship.

  • Dr Mothomang Diaho qualified as a medical doctor at the University of Adelaide, Australia 37 years ago. She subsequently specialised in public health and completed a Master’s in Business Administration from the University of the Witwatersrand and a Programme for Management Development at the Harvard Business School.

    She founded the Spiral Aloe clinics https://spiralaloe.co.za/summit/ to focus on holistic Health and Wellness interventions and consulting in both individuals and organizations. She is a qualified Gestalt practitioner and Coach. She is passionate about preventative medicine and beliefs that lifestyle is the real medicine.  Mothomang, has facilitated Leadership Development Programmes with Duke ED, USB ED and various Government and Civil Society Organizations and has been a guest Lecture at the Wits School of Public Health for the MPH Programme.

    She published booklets on Community conversations during her time at the Nelson Mandela Foundation https://www.nelsonmandela.org/publications/category/community-conversations Mothomang is a Fellow of the African Leadership Initiative www.africanleadership.net and is a Founding Member of TEACH South Africa. She serves on Private and Public boards.

  • Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela is Professor and Research Chair for Historical Trauma and Transformation and SARChI Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma at Stellenbosch University. Her work focuses mainly on two strands of research: exploring intergenerational repercussions of oppression and institutional violence, and exploring what she terms “reparative humanism.” The latter builds on her earlier research on the psychoanalytic interpretation of remorse and forgiveness in the aftermath of human rights violations.

    Prof Gobodo-Madikizela’s accolades include the Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship Award, the Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, the Alan Paton Award, the Eleanor Roosevelt Award, Distinguished African Scholar title at Cornell University’s Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and honorary doctorates from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany, and Rhodes University.

  • Dr Samantha Kriger completed her undergraduate, Honours and Masters studies in music and education at the University of Cape Town (UCT). After teaching in South African schools for 25 years she completed a PhD in Curriculum Studies at Stellenbosch University. She is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), South Africa, where her focus is on pre-service teacher education. Current affiliations include American Educational research Association (AERA) and Literacy association of South Africa (LITASA)

    Her research and practice focuses on teacher education from pre-school through to higher education, teaching practice within schools, educational inequality, music education and its impact on language literacy development and integration across the curriculum. She conducts mixed methodological work exploring how music, race, language, and culture impact students learning in diverse classrooms. Publications have appeared in Research Policy, Womens Studies International Forum, South African Journal of Childhood education and Perspectives in Education.  She has co-authored with Prof Jonathan Jansen. Who gets in and Why? Race, class and aspiration in South Africa’s elite schools shines a light on how schools use admissions processes to maintain race and class privileges within former white schools.

  • Dr Robert Morrell is a Senior Research Scholar in the Centre for Higher Education Development (CHED) at UCT. Prior to this he managed and directed two UCT academic support and advancement projects -the mid-career Next Generation Professoriate (NGP)) and the early-career New Generation of Academics Programme (nGAP). He has degrees in Journalism and History (Rhodes), a Masters degree in history (Wits) and a PhD in economic history (Natal).

    His research has focussed primarily on gender issues, including masculinity, violence and schooling. He has edited and written 10 books including Changing Men in Southern Africa (2001) and From Boys to Gentlemen. Settler Masculinity in Colonial Natal (2001). In the recent period he has been involved in work on the geopolitics of knowledge including co-authoring (with Fran Collyer, Raewyn Connell and Joao Maia) Knowledge and Global Power: Making new sciences in the South (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2019).

    Dr Morrell has been B1 rated by the NRF for three consecutive rounds and is the recipient of the Rhodes University Distinguished Alumnus award (2020).

  • Professor Stella M. Nkomo is a Professor in the Department of Human Resource Management at the University of Pretoria and former Deputy Dean for Research and Postgraduate Studies.    Her current research focuses on diversity and race and gender in organisations.

    She is an Associate Editor for Equality, Diversity & Inclusion: an international journal and Senior Editor for diversity entries in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Business and Management.  She has received the Sage Scholarly Contributions Award (Academy of Management) for her research on gender and diversity in organisations; the Distinguished Woman Scholar in the Social Sciences Award from the Department of Science and Technology (South Africa), and the International Leadership Association Lifetime Achievement Award.

    Professor Nkomo is A-rated South African researcher and founding President of the Africa Academy of Management.

  • Prof James Ogude is a Professor of African Literature and cultures, and the Director of the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria. He is the current Director of the African regional hub of the BRIDGES Coalition in the UNESCO Management of Social Transformations Programme (MOST), located at the University of Pretoria. Before moving to the University of Pretoria, he was a Professor of African Literature and Cultures in the School of Literature, Language and Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, serving as the Head of African Literature and also an Assistant Dean – Research, in the Faculty of Humanities.

    His research interests include, postcolonial literatures, popular cultures in Africa and more recently, Ubuntu and African ecologies. He recently concluded a five-year project on the Southern African philosophical concept of Ubuntu funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation and currently the Principal Investigator of a Mellon funded supra-national project on African Urbanities, which brings together scholars from the universities of Ghana, Makerere, and UCT. He is the author of Ngugi’s Novels and African History. He has edited nine books and one anthology of African stories. His most recent edited volumes include, Ubuntu and the Reconstitution of Community (Indiana UP, 2019) and Environmental Humanities of Extraction in Africa: Poetics and Politics of Exploitation (Routledge, 2023). He is A2 rated scientist by the NRF.

  • Evolutionary biologist and zoologist Terence (Terry) Robinson is Professor Emeritus at Stellenbosch University.  Pivotal in the development of his career were the formative experiences at the University of Pretoria’s Mammal Research Institute under the directorship of the late John Skinner, a postdoc with TC Hsu at the MD Anderson Cancer Research Institute (The University of Texas Health Science Centre), as well as several years spent as a research associate at the Institute for Molecular Genetics, Baylor College of Medicine (Texas Medical Centre as part of David Ledbetter’s group).

    At various times he was Head of Department, Vice Dean for Research at the Faculty of Science at Stellenbosch University, and an NRF A-rated researcher. Terry spent extended periods as a research fellow at Cambridge University (funded by a Wellcome Trust Collaborative Research Grant with Professor Malcolm Smith), and as a CNRS visiting researcher at the University of Montpellier.  He served on the editorial boards of several international journals, was a recipient of the Zoological Society of South Africa’s Gold medal award, The Havenga Prize for Life Sciences from the South African Academy for Science and Arts, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa and was selected as one of the Legends of SA Science by ASSAf in 2020.  The achievements of his graduate students and postdocs, many of whom hold senior positions at academic institutions nationally and abroad as well as in conservation and related industries, are a source of great pride.

  • Prof Linda Ronnie is Senior Research Scholar and Professor of Organisational Behaviour and People Management at the School of Management Studies, University of Cape Town. A National Research Foundation (NRF) rated scholar, Ronnie has published extensively in the fields of both organisational behaviour and management education.

    She has focussed on key topics such as diversity, the psychological contract, and intricacies of the employer-employee relationship. She is the proud recipient of the UCT Distinguished Teacher Award, winner of the inaugural Emerald Case Writing Competition, and runner-up of the 2021 Ceeman’s Case Writing Competition, both international awards. Ronnie recently completed a term as Dean of Commerce at UCT.

     

  • Professor Himla Soodyall is Executive Officer of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) and Research Professor in Human Genetics at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits);. She is responsible for ground-breaking genetic research into the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa in which her studies have identified some of the oldest DNA found in living people today, adding weight to the theory that modern humans evolved in the area now known as southern Africa.

    Professor Soodyal was awarded the National Order of Mapungubwe: Bronze; for her contribution to science. She was elected member of the ASSAf Council in 2011 and appointed General Secretary in 2014. In this position she has been active in drafting of several strategies to promote emerging scholarship in South Africa.

    Professor Soodyall is a profiled ambassador for science in South Africa and internationally, with experience in research and a knowledge of governance and public administration, as well as engagement at all levels of community in Africa and abroad.

  • Prof Crain Soudien was educated in the fields of education and African Studies at the Universities of Cape Town and UNISA in South Africa and the State University of New York at Buffalo. His PhD dissertation from Buffalo was on South African youth identity.  He is a former deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town, where he remains an emeritus professor in Education and African Studies and the former Chief Executive Officer of the Human Sciences Research Council. He has honorary professorial appointments at the Nelson Mandela University and the Cape University of Technology.

    Prof Soudien’s publications in the areas of social difference, culture, education policy, comparative education, educational change, public history and popular culture include four books, onewe co-authored book, six edited collections and over 230 articles, reviews, reports, and book chapters. He has an A-rating in the South African research system. He is involved in a number of local, national and international social and cultural organisations and is chairperson of the Independent Examinations Board, a founder and former chairperson of the District Six Museum Foundation, a former president of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies, and has served as the chair of three Ministerial Committees of Enquiry, including the Ministerial Committee on Transformation in Higher Education and the Ministerial Committee to Evaluate Textbooks for Discrimination.

    He is a fellow of the International Academy of Education, the African Academy of Science, a Senior Fellow of NORRAG, Geneva Graduate Institute, a member of the Academy of Science of South African, a former fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, the SARCHI Chair in Development Education, UNISA and the Centre for Global Citizenship Education and Research, University of Alberta. Prof Soudien serves on the boards of a number of cultural, heritage, education and civil society structures.

  • Dr Aldo Stroebel is the inaugural Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research, Innovation and Internationalisation at the University of Mpumalanga. The portfolio provide strategic leadership for all aspects related to research, innovation and partnerships, and executive management of Library and Information Services and Institutional Centres and Institutes.

    A recognised scholar in sustainable agriculture, Dr Stroebel was elected as a founding member of the SA Young Academy of Science (SAYAS). He is a Foreign Fellow of the Ugandan National Academy of Sciences, Senior Fellow of the Pan-African Scientific Research Council, and an Honorary Scholar at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Austria. He was a former Visiting Fellow at Cornell University’s Institute for African Development (IAD). More than 100 journal articles, book chapters and reports have been published (incl. two edited volumes by Cambridge Scholars and CTA), and 17 Master’s and PhD students have been supervised/ co-supervised.

    He had a comprehensive and globally diverse higher education training profession: BSc- and Hons-degrees (University of Pretoria); Masters in International Agricultural Development (University of Ghent, Belgium); PhD in Sustainable Agriculture (Joint Programme between the University of the Free State and Cornell University, USA); Postdoctoral research (Wageningen University, The Netherlands). Professional training courses have been completed in Research Management in Australia, in Gender Programming in The Netherlands, Diversity Leadership in the USA, and Corporate Governance in South Africa.

    He serves as South Africa’s National Contact Point for the European Research Council, and as Board Member of the Water Research Commission. He is the immediate-past co-chairperson of the Executive Support Group of the Global Research Council, and former President of the Southern African Research and Innovation Management Association (SARIMA).

    Dr Stroebel joined UMP from the National Research Foundation (NRF) where has was Executive Director Strategic Partnerships (2013-2023), with demonstrated success in developing a comprehensive suite of significant partnership and collaborative engagements for the NRF, with high levels of resource leveraging, contributing to and positioning South Africa’s National System of Innovation (NSI). Prior to the NRF, he worked at the University of the Free State (2003-2013) as Senior Lecturer; Associate Professor in the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture; Founding Director of International Affairs; and Director International Academic and Transformation Projects in the Office of the Vice-Chancellor and Rector. He was involved in the designing and implementation of numerous policy, organisational and development systems and strategies for the management and mentoring of multicultural teams, and establishing and guiding multi-sectoral partnerships and networks in support of research and innovation. During 1998-2002, he was a researcher and lecturer at the Postgraduate School of Agriculture and Rural Development, University of Pretoria, and Coordinator and Researcher of the Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP), a WK Kellogg Foundation-funded initiative in six countries.

    He is the 2022 recipient of the SARIMA Research Management Excellence Award.

  • Mr Janus van As completed an MBA in Finance and investment, BSc Honours in Plant Science and  BEd FET in (natural science). Janus previously headed the academic literacy for science portfolio at UP and established the Learning Technologies portfolios at two universities (Stellenbosch University, Faculty of Health Science and Glasgow Caledonian University, Business School). Janus joined the Department of Family Medicine and Primary Care at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2020, in the capacity as an academic and blended learning coordinator. In this role, Janus oversees projects under 3 strategic foci; Learning Excellence, Marketing and Promotions and the expanded academic platform. This portfolio includes project managing the development of a new honour’s degree in Health Systems Science, manage a team of instructional designers to assist staff with the online learning component of blended learning, the development of the Helping You Learn Online course and the Digital Abilities course for the university as well as other courses.

    Mr van As also manages a team that develops learning technologies for the faculty and the implementation of networking and setting up of academic hubs on the expanded academic platform to enhance the learning experience of students at clinics and hospitals.  In addition to this Janus coordinates the professional learning series and other faculty development initiatives for staff such as developing a staff induction programme,  the marketing and fundraising activities for the Department and . Janus also serves on the Wits Talent Hub steering committee. His research interest lies in Higher Education leadership and culture and managing learning excellence and he is currently busy with a PhD on the development of a framework for the management of learning excellence of undergraduate programmes in Health Sciences

  • Our colleague, Dr Cyrill Walters, senior lecturer at the Stellenbosch Business School and a Research Fellow in Higher Education passed away on Thursday, 28 December 2023.

    Prof Jonathan Jansen, Distinguished Professor in Education at SU, described Walters as an exceptional postdoctoral scholar and research associate who provided leading research in gender, higher education and pandemic effects.

    “Her passion and concern for women’s progression in higher education through on-time data and publication ensured that she became a featured speaker at several university forums throughout the country, a role which she cherished and for which she was widely respected,” Jansen noted. “She quickly mastered all the disciplines of advanced research in higher education and published quality books and articles with top publishers around the world in a relatively short period of time since achieving her PhD. It is rare for a scholar of her capacity and potential to gain prominence so quickly in international higher education at a relatively young age. Her loss to SU and the academy more broadly is immense,” he concluded.

    Walters will be fondly remembered as a remarkable woman who transcended the boundaries of professional success, said Dr Armand Bam, Head of Social Impact at the Stellenbosch Business School. “Above all, Cyrill will be remembered for her humanity, decency, loyalty and integrity. Cyrill was a beacon of inspiration within our community and has left an indelible mark on both her students and colleagues alike. Her exceptional scholarly achievements were matched only by her passion for uplifting others through her teaching, particularly in the realm of decision-making, where she challenged and enlightened countless MBA and other postgraduate students,” Bam said.

    She was also our dear friend and an irreplaceable and respected colleague and friend of the FPP programme. She will be sorely missed but not forgotten.

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    Dr Walters graduated with an MBA from the USB in 2012 and completed her doctoral coursework at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University in 2015-2016, before graduating with a PhD from the Graduate School of Business at UCT.

    She also taught on the MBA and PGDip Business Administration programmes at the University’s Business School. She was working on projects examining the decolonisation of knowledge in South African universities, the impact of COVID-19 on the academic work of women scholars, and the application of complexity theory in decision-making and higher education leadership.  https://cyrillwalters.co.za/

  • Professor Brenda Wingfield is Research Leader of the DST – NRF Centre of Excellence in Tree Health Biotechnology and holds the DST/NRF SARChI research chair in Fungal Genomics at the University of Pretoria. With her husband and collaborator, Mike Wingfield, Brenda started the Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute (FABI).

    Her research programme focuses on the molecular genetics and genomics of plant pathogenic fungi. She and collaborators sequenced the first fungal genome in Africa. Professor Wingfield is former vice president of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), she served as chair of the NSTF (National Science and Technology Forum) and she has been the secretary general of the International Society of Plant Pathology since 2013.

    She is also former deputy dean in the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Science at the University of Pretoria. Prof Wingfield has been a PhD supervisor/co-supervisor to 53 graduates of which 22 were women, all of whom are now successful scientists in their own right. She is also the author of a number of science communication articles to promote the importance of science and the challenges faced by women in science.

  • Chantelle Wyley is a coach, facilitator and trainer with a background in anti-apartheid activism, and development project/program management. She is on the faculty of the Gestalt International Organization and Leadership Development Program (Seattle & Chicago, USA), and has taught in the business schools of the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of Cape Town, and the Gordon Institute of Business Science, University of Pretoria.

    She has served as a Technical Advisor in the Government Technical Advisory Centre, National Treasury. Her work in organization and leadership development applies research in neuroscience, emotional intelligence and GestaltOD, to support leaders in personal development and in cultivating powerful presence and resonant relationships.

    She is accredited as a Professional Certified Coach by the International Coach Federation, as a Gestalt Practitioner in Organisations (GPO) by the European Association of Gestalt Therapy, and has been awarded a Lifetime Achiever award by the Gestalt Centre for Organization and Systems Development (Ohio, USA).

  • Professor Makhosazana Xaba is an Associate Professor of Practice in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg. She’s currently working on a biography of Noni Jabavu.  Professor Xaba is an award-winning multi-genre anthologist and short story writer.  Her 2019 anthology Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets, 2000 – 2018 was hailed as an instant classic and was the co-winner of the 2021 HSS Award in the Non-Fiction Edited Volume category.

    Professor Xaba’s debut  collection of fiction, Running and other stories was a co-winner of the 2014 SALA Nadine Gordimer Short Story award.  She is the author of three poetry collections and her fourth The Art of Waiting for Tales: Found Poetry from Grace – a novel was published end of October 2022.