Latest News Archive

Please select Category, Year, and then Month to display items

UFS wins big at 2019 IABC and MACE awards ceremonies

12 December 2019 | Story Amanda Tongha | Photo MACE

MACE read more — Staff members from the Department of Communication and Marketing celebrating their MACE Excellence Awards.

The Department of Communication and Marketing again received national and international recognition for its communication and awareness campaigns this year.

On 28 November 2019, the department made a big splash at the national Marketing, Advancement, and Communication in Education (MACE) 2019 Excellence Awards, winning multiple awards for its work in communication and marketing. Scooping up five awards, the department earned accolades for the communication campaign on the MT Steyn statue review process, the Kovsie App, and awareness campaigns for gender-based violence and the Kovsies Multilingual Mokete.

This comes on top of the two awards the department won at the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) Africa Silver Quill Awards during an awards ceremony presented in Centurion, Gauteng, on 16 October 2019. During this event, the department was also acknowledged with an Excellence Award for the Kovsie App communication campaign and a Merit Award for the communication campaign on the MT Steyn statue review process.

Celebrating the best in marketing, advancement, and communication

Hosted annually, the MACE Excellence Awards recognise and celebrate the excellence of specialists and practitioners in marketing, advancement, and communication in the higher-education sector. MACE plays a vital role in adding value to practitioners through high-quality development programmes, facilitating networking partnerships and transformation, as well as promoting best practices among these professions at member institutions.

At the 2018 MACE Excellence Awards, the Department of Communication and Marketing received the prestigious Severus Cerff Award, presented to a higher-education institution that consistently excels in the fields of marketing and communication. The department also brought back six other awards, including three gold awards, which are awarded to the highest-scoring entries in the 30 categories evaluated. These ranged from brand-building campaigns to print publications; website to social media, assessed by marketing and communication professionals in the higher-education and private sectors.

Continuing its winning streak at the 2019 MACE Excellence Awards held in Port Elizabeth from 27 to 28 November 2019, the Department of Communication and Marketing was singled out for keeping stakeholders informed on the MT Steyn statue review process. For this, the department received the prestigious Business Issue Special Award, presented to an entry that successfully addressed a critical business issue.

Student Recruitment content

Staff members from the Department of Student Recruitment Services celebrating their MACE Excellence Awards

Being recognised nationally and internationally

Adding to the UFS tally, the Department of Student Recruitment Services was also recognised at the 2019 MACE Excellence Awards for its communication campaigns to market the university. The department won three awards, one gold (for the School Anthem – Petunia Secondary School campaign) and two bronze awards for the Light the fire – Grade 9 school subject choice intervention and Re-engineering of the UFS Undergraduate Prospectus 2020 campaigns, bringing the number of UFS MACE Excellence Awards for this year to eight.

Lacea Loader, Director: Communication and Marketing, who accepted the Business Issue Special Award on behalf of the University of the Free State (UFS), says the recognition affirms the role the department plays in building and promoting the UFS brand.

“I am immensely proud of the national and international recognition the Department of Communication and Marketing received for its work this year. Being recognised by our peers for quality and innovative work is most rewarding and it demonstrates the dedication and commitment of a highly innovative and creative team.”

The awards won by the Department of Communication and Marketing included three gold awards for the communication campaign on the MT Steyn statue review process, Gender-based violence Awareness Campaign, and Kovsies Multilingual Mokete Communication Campaign; a silver award for the KovsieApp Communication Campaign; and the Business Issue Special Award for the Communication Campaign on the MT Steyn statue review process.

- A record number of 202 entries from 15 institutions were evaluated in the 2019 MACE Excellence Awards.

News Archive

Is milk really so well-known, asks UFS’s Prof. Osthoff

2011-03-17

Prof. Garry Osthoff
Photo: Stephen Collett

Prof. Garry Osthoff opened a whole new world of milk to the audience in his inaugural lecture, Milk: the well-known (?) food, in our Department of Microbial, Biochemical and Food Biotechnology of the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences.

Prof. Osthoff has done his research in protein chemistry, immuno-chemistry and enzymology at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Pretoria and post-doctoral research at the Bowman-Grey School of Medicine, North Carolina, USA. That was instrumental in establishing food chemistry at the university.

He is involved in chemical aspects of food, with a focus on dairy science and technology. He is also involved in the research of cheese processing as well as milk evolution and concentrated on milk evolution in his lecture. Knowledge of milk from dairy animals alone does not provide all the explanations of milk as food.

Some aspects he highlighted in his lecture were that milk is the first food to be utilised by young mammals and that it is custom-designed for each species. “However, mankind is an opportunist and has found ways of easy access to food by the practice of agriculture, where plants as well as animals were employed or rather exploited,” he said.

The cow is the best-known milk producer, but environmental conditions forced man to select other animals. In spite of breeding selection, cattle seem not to have adapted to the most extreme conditions such as high altitudes with sub-freezing temperatures, deserts and marshes.

Prof. Osthoff said the consumption of the milk as an adult is not natural; neither is the consumption of milk across species. This practice of mankind may often have consequences, when signs of malnutrition or diseases are noticed. Two common problems are an allergy to milk and lactose intolerance.

Allergies are normally the result of an immune response of the consumer to the foreign proteins found in the milk. In some cases it might help to switch from one milk source to another, such as switching from cow’s milk to goat’s milk.

Prof. Osthoff said lactose intolerance – the inability of adult humans to digest lactose, the milk sugar – is natural, as adults lose that ability to digest lactose. The symptoms of the condition are stomach cramps and diarrhoea. This problem is mainly found in the warmer climates of the world. This could be an indication of early passive development of dairy technology. In these regions milk could not be stored in its fresh form, but in a fermented form, in which case the lactose was pre-digested by micro-organisms, and the human population never adapted to digesting lactose in adulthood.

According to Prof. Osthoff, it is basically the lactose in milk that has spurred dairy technology. Its fermentation has resulted in the development of yoghurts and all the cheeses that we know. In turn, the intolerance to lactose has spurred a further technological solution: lactose-free milk is currently produced by pre-digestion of lactose with enzymes.

It was realised that the milks and products from different species differed in quality aspects such as keeping properties and taste. It was also realised that the nutritional properties differed as well as their effects on health. One example is the mentioned allergy against cow’s milk proteins, which may be solved by the consumption of goat’s milk. The nutritional benefits and technological processing of milk aroused an interest in more information, and it was realised that the information gained from human milk and that of the few domesticated species do not provide a complete explanation of the properties of milk as food. Of the 250 species of milk which have been studied, only the milk of humans and a few domesticated dairy animals has been studied in detail.

Media Release
15 March 2011
Issued by: Lacea Loader
Director: Strategic Communication
Tel: 051 401 2584
Cell: 083 645 2454
E-mail: news@ufs.ac.za

Back

Economic and Management Sciences

Education

Health Sciences

The Humanities

Law

Natural and Agricultural Sciences

Theology and Religion

Open Distance Learning

Business School

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