Latest News Archive

Please select Category, Year, and then Month to display items
Categories
UFS News Media Release Research
Years
2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
Months
January February March April May June July August September October November December
Previous Archive
01 February 2019 | Story Zama Feni | Photo Charl Devenish
Disease Control and Prevention InStory
From left, seated: Dr Mathew Esona, CDC delegate; Dr Michael Bowen, CDC delegate; Dr Martin Nyaga, lead Researcher at the UFS-NGS Unit; standing: Mojalefa Buti, Office of the Vice-Dean, UFS Faculty of Health Sciences; Dr Glen Tylor, Senior Director, Directorate Research Development; Cornelius Hagenmeier, Director, Office for International Affairs; and Dr Saheed Sabiu, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences.

In pursuit of efforts to advance research on viruses and disease control, the United States-based Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has made a commitment to enhance the University of the Free State (UFS) Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) Unit’s data collection systems and further empower its staff and students.

UFS and US guests explore areas of mutual; cooperation

During a visit to the university in early December last year CDC delegation, Dr Michael Bowen and Dr Mathew Esona, a meeting was held with the lead Researcher at the UFS-NGS Unit, Dr Martin Nyaga; Senior Director of the UFS Directorate Research Development, Dr Glen Tylor; Director of UFS Office for International Affairs, Cornelius Hagenmeier; and Dr Saheed Sabiu Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Natural and Agriculture Sciences. It was in this meeting that areas of mutual collaboration and engagement between the two institutions which include technology transfer, funding and wet and dry laboratory quality control and capacity development were identified.

The UFS-NGS Unit, established in 2016, enjoys longstanding networking and collaborative ventures with renowned researchers in Africa, the USA, and Europe – which in return, have contributed immensely to the research activities of the university as a whole.

Dr Nyaga said in an effort to advance genomics research in the NGS Unit, the visitors have committed themselves to initiate and further enhance capacity development for the unit’s staff and students.

US guests impressed with advanced equipment at UFS

The CDC delegation were intrigued that the UFS also operates a Miseq Illumina platform like the one used at their enteric-viruses laboratory. It could thus be in line to assist in developing exclusive pipelines for the analysis of NGS data generated by the UFS-NGS Unit.

This is a personal sequencing system, which is a powerful state-of-the-art next-generation sequencer. It uses sequencing-by-synthesis technology capable of sequencing up to 15GB of high-quality filtered bases per run, with up to 600 base-pair read lengths. This allows the assembly of small genomes or the detection of target variants with unmatched accuracy, especially within homo-polymer regions.

UFS and CDC engagements still on

Further engagements about the identified areas of collaboration are ongoing between Hagenmeier, Dr Bowen, and Dr Nyaga, who are currently working on appropriate mechanisms to enact the envisaged collaboration between the two institutions.

The NGS Unit received research awards from the World Health Organisation, South African Medical Research Council, Poliomyelitis Research Foundation, and the National Research Foundation for different aspects of genomics research, and more recently from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for the Enteric Viruses Genome Initiative, involving four African countries (South Africa, Ghana, Malawi, and Cameroon).

News Archive

Beauty personified through written word
2016-07-29

Description: Zubeida Jaffer Tags: Zubeida Jaffer

Dr Thozama April, University of Fort Hare
historian, Zubeida Jaffer, current Writer-in-Residence
in the Department of Communication Sciences
at the UFS and author of Beauty of the Heart:
The life and times of Charlotte Mannya Maxeke
and Prof Jonathan Jansen, Vice-Chancellor and Rector
of the UFS at the book launch of Zubeida Jaffer.
Photo: Rulanzen Martin

“It is quite easy to write a book in a professional capacity but very difficult to write a book from the heart.”

These were the words of Prof Jonathan Jansen, Vice-Chancellor and Rector of the University of the Free State (UFS), at the launch of Beauty of the Heart: The life and times of Charlotte Mannya Maxeke by Zubeida Jaffer, the current Writer-in-Residence in the Department of Communication Sciences at the UFS.

Perseverance and dedication yields results

Writing a book from the heart is exactly what Jaffer, an award-winning South African journalist and author, set out to do. “When you make the choice to write a story, you need to be very dedicated,” she said.

As this is Jaffer’s third book, one would think that she would have no difficulty in putting pen to paper. On the contrary, she mentioned that it was, in fact, the hardest book she has written because the narrative was not easy to get hold of.

“I wanted Charlotte’s voice to come through, and it took my team and I three years of research and writing,” she said.

Maxeke’s story helps to shape South African society

The three-person panel, hosted by the UFS Sasol Library and SUN MeDIA, and chaired by Prof Jansen, included Jaffer and Dr Thozama April, University of Fort Hare historian who had done her PHD thesis on Maxeke.

Dr April said that Maxeke’s life story is an inspiring one, as it encourages a rethinking of established narratives. “These established narratives have made it possible for historians and researchers to write about the shaping of South African society,” she said.

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