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10 December 2018 | Story Leonie Bolleurs | Photo Supplied
UFS CMD team at the MACE Awards
The team from the UFS which attended the Mace Excellence Awards function in Cape Town this year, are from the left: Rulanzen Martin, Valentino Ndaba, Lacea Loader, Lelanie de Wet, Maria Venter; back: Zama Feni, Vivek Daya and Eugene Seegers.

The Department of Communication and Marketing won seven awards during the 2018 Excellence Awards presented by the National Association of Marketing, Advancement, and Communication in Education (MACE), which took place in Cape Town on 29 November 2018. It is the third consecutive year the department has brought home seven and more awards for its work in communication and marketing.

Lacea Loader, Director: Communication and Marketing at the University if the Free State (UFS) says: “Being recognised by our peers for quality and innovative work is most rewarding. This year, 172 entries were received from 12 institutions across the country. Although the competition was tough the UFS also received the Severus Cerff Award, one of three special awards. This award is made to the institution with the highest success ratio and for consistent excellence.” Loader serves on the MACE Board of Directors as Excellence Awards Coordinator.

Promoting best practices

MACE plays a vital role in adding value to practitioners in marketing, advancement and communication through high-quality development programmes, facilitating networking partnerships and transformation, as well as promoting best practices among these professions at member institutions.

The awards ceremony is part of the MACE Annual National Congress, which took place from 27-29 November 2018 at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Cape Town. The MACE Congress is a platform on which experts from the fields of marketing, advancement, and communication share experiences and best practices.

This year’s programme included speakers such Thabang Chiloane (executive head of Nedbank’s Group Public Affairs), Dr Marina Joubert (senior science communication researcher at CREST), Karyn Strybos (Marketing Manager at Everlytic), Bruce Dube (Managing Director of Nine80 Digital Media) and Brendan Cooper (head of New Media’s internal communications division).

Recognising hard work and innovation

Lelanie de Wet, Manager: Digital Communication received the Platinum award in the Division Campaigns with her entry for the Website Re-launch Awareness campaign. The Platinum award is bestowed on the best entry in a specific division.

The Digital Communication Unit in the Department of Communication and Marketing walked away with four more awards. De Wet also received a Gold award in the Design for Digital Media category for her work on the KovsieLife student web design.

Moeketsi Mogotsi received a Gold award in the category Design for Visual Media for his entry: UFS Women’s Month Billboard.

Barend Nagel, who joined the department this year, received a Gold Award for his photographs for the Africa Month Awareness campaign in the category Photography: Feature and Documentary. Nagel also received a Bronze award in the category Videography Skills, for his video entry: UFS Exam Hack.

In the Unit: Internal and Media Communication, Valentino Ndaba brought home a Bronze Medal for her entry of the BSafe Take Action campaign which was entered in the Issue Management Campaigns category.

IABC Gold Quill Merit Award

The Department of Communication and Marketing earlier this year also received an International Gold Quill Merit Award for the Website Re-launch Awareness campaign.

“The fact that we were also again acknowledged by the International Assocation for Business Communicators  is also commendable. "I am immensely proud of the national and international recognition my team received this year,” said Loader.

MACE Awards. Photo by Sonia Small
MACE Awards. Photo by Sonia Small
2018 Africa Month photographs
2018 Africa Month photographs
2018 Africa Month Photographs
2018 Africa Month Photographs
UFS Womens Month Billboard
UFS Womens Month Billboard
BSAFE Safety week day 2018 2
BSAFE Safety week day 2018 2
BSafe Safety week 2018
BSafe Safety week 2018

News Archive

Newly operational sequencing unit in genomics at UFS
2016-09-09

Description: Next Generation Sequencing Tags: Next Generation Sequencing

Dr Martin Nyaga and his research assistant,
Tshidiso Mogotsi in the Next Generation
Sequencing Laboratory.
Photo: Charl Devenish

The Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) unit at the UFS was established as an interdisciplinary facility under the Directorate for Research Development, Faculty of Health Sciences and Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences.

The aim of the NGS facility is to aid internal and external investigators undertaking studies on Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequencing, assembly and bioinformatics approaches using the more advanced Illumina MiSeq NGS platform.

The NGS unit became operational in 2016 and is managed by Dr Martin Nyaga and administered through the office of the Dean, Faculty of Health Sciences, under the leadership of Prof Gert Van Zyl. Dr Nyaga has vast experience in microbial genomics, having done his PhD in Molecular Virology.

He has worked and collaborated with globally recognised centres of excellence in Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic genomics, namely the J. Craig Venter Institute and the Laboratory of Viral Metagenomics, Rega Institute, among others.

The unit has undertaken several projects and successfully generated data on bacterial, viral and human genomes. Currently, work is ongoing on bacterial and fungal metagenomics studies through 16S rRNA sequencing.

In addition, the unit is also working on plasmid/insert sequencing and whole genome sequencing of animal and human rotaviruses. The unit has capacity to undertake other kinds of panels like the HLA, Pan-cancer and Tumor 15 sequencing, among others.

Several investigators from the UFS including but not limited to Prof Felicity Burt, Prof Wijnand Swart, Dr Frans O’Neil, Dr Trudi O'Neill, Dr Charlotte Boucher, Dr Marieka Gryzenhout and Dr Kamaldeen Baba are actively in collaboration with the NGS unit.

The unit has also invested in other specialised equipment such as the M220 Focused-ultrasonicator (Covaris), 2100 Bioanalyzer system (Agilent) and the real-time PCR cycler, the Rotor-Gene Q (Qiagen), which both the UFS and external investigators can use for their research.

Investigators working on molecular and related studies are encouraged to engage with Dr Nyaga on how they would like to approach their genomics projects at the UFS NGS unit. 

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