Latest News Archive

Please select Category, Year, and then Month to display items
Previous Archive
30 December 2019 | Story Thabo Kessah | Photo Thabo Kessah
Gavin Dollman
Gavin Dollman is involved in virtual prospecting for fossils using a drone.

Gavin Dollman is one of the young researchers selected for the international research programme funded through the US-SA Higher Education Network. This prestigious programme is aimed at giving PhD candidates and their supervisors the opportunity to regularly travel to the USA and spend time at participating US universities where their co-promoters will be based.

“The University Staff Doctoral Programme (USDP) has allowed me to bring my idea of collaborative science to fruition. It’s an exciting opportunity,” Dollman said.

Dollman added that his PhD studies would focus on the machine and deep learning for prospecting for palaeontology. He is studying with the Appalachian State University. Other participating universities are Montana and Colorado State.

He has also had the privilege to work alongside a team of Geologists and Paleontologists from the universities of Birmingham, Zurich and Oxford in a project under the auspices of the University of the Witwatersrand’s Evolution Studies Institute (ESI) on a site in rural Eastern Cape.

“My role within this massive project is to perform a detailed survey of the sites and the surrounding area for later analysis. I used a drone known as the DJI Phantom 3 Pro with which I took hundreds of pictures that were later put together to create a detailed map,” he said.

“The maps allowed for virtual prospecting by the team and will in the long term serve as the basis for a predictive fossil model for the area.”

Dollman is a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Informatics on the Qwaqwa Campus.

News Archive

Winner: Copy-writing course
2006-06-06

Ms Magdaleen Kruger, station manager of RSG, visited the University of the Free State's (UFS) Department of Afrikaans and Dutch, German and French to hand over the RSG Prize for copy-writing to Miss Nadia Fourie, a student at the UFS. Me Fourie was a final-year student in the programme Integrated Marketing Communication in 2005. The copy- writing course is compulsory for this qualification.

The copy-writing course is presented on behalf of the UFS Department of Communication and Information Studies by Dr Angelique van Niekerk, lecturer at the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch, German and French. RSG has been an external partner of the copy-writing course since 2005 and also serve on the judges’ panel of the Afrikaans radio advertisements made during this course.  The extension of the partnership between the UFS and RSG was also discussed. 

During the awarding of the RSG Prize were in front, from the left: Dr van Niekerk and Ms Kruger.  At the back were from the left Ms Fourie (prize winner), Ms Lacea Loader (media representative of the UFS) and Ms Dalmé Mulder (lecturer at the UFS Department of Communication and Information Studies). Photo: Stephen Collett

We use cookies to make interactions with our websites and services easy and meaningful. To better understand how they are used, read more about the UFS cookie policy. By continuing to use this site you are giving us your consent to do this.

Accept