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21 July 2020 | Story Nitha Ramnath | Photo UFS photo archive
The Department of Business Management within the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences is one of four successful recipients of the Nurturing Emerging Scholars Programme (NESP), which aims to recruit honours graduates who demonstrate academic ability and express an early interest in the possibility of an academic career. 

 “The NESP is a mechanism that addresses a potential shortcoming in the department in the medium to long term. Most of the academics in the department specialise either in entrepreneurship or marketing. As such, the availability of academics with interdisciplinary business knowledge who can teach and do research across the different sub-fields of business management is limited,” says Prof Brownhilder Neneh, Associate Professor in the Department of Business Management.

Once graduates enter the programme – as NESP master’s graduates they form part of a resource pool from which new academics can be recruited. 

Prof Neneh continues: “Considering the imminent retirement of academics in the department, the NESP provides an opportunity to recruit an academic who is able to work with experienced academics, gain experience, and ‘prepare’ the person to become an expert across the different fields in the department.”

“This programme would assist in succession planning within the department as well as training individuals within academia,” she says. 

According to Prof Neneh, access to this funding opportunity will further strengthen and expand the path that the department has embarked upon as far as striving for excellence in teaching, research, and community engagement is concerned, thereby contributing to address key societal challenges. “Appointing an NESP candidate would be an ideal opportunity to recruit an academic who will be able to work with the senior staff and gain experience and teaching/research competencies relevant to the 4IR, and ‘prepare’ the person to become the business management expert in the department,” she says.

News Archive

Dr Abdon Atangana cements his research globally by solving fractional calculus problem
2014-12-03

 

Dr Abdon Atangana

To publish 29 papers in respected international journals – and all of that in one year – is no mean feat. Postdoctoral researcher Abdon Atangana at the Institute for Groundwater Studies at the University of the Free State (UFS) reached this mark by October 2014, shortly before his 29th birthday.

His latest paper, ‘Modelling the Advancement of the Impurities and the Melted Oxygen concentration within the Scope of Fractional Calculus’, has been accepted for publication by the International Journal of Non-Linear Mechanics.

In previously-published research he solved a problem in the field of fractional calculus by introducing a fractional derivative called ‘Beta-derivative’ and its anti-derivative called ‘Atangana-Beta integral’, thereby cementing his research in this field.

Dr Atangana, originally from Cameroon, received his PhD in Geohydrology at the UFS in 2013. His research interests include:
• the theory of fractional calculus;
• modelling real world problems with fractional order derivatives;
• applications of fractional calculus;
• analytical methods for partial differential equations;
• analytical methods for ordinary differential equations;
• numerical methods for partial and ordinary differential equations; and
• iterative methods and uncertainties modelling.

Dr Atangana says that, “Applied mathematics can be regarded as the bridge between theory and practice. The use of mathematical tools for solving real world problems is as old as creation itself. As written in the book Genesis ‘And God saw the light, that it was good; and divided the light from the darkness’, the word division appears here as the well-known method of separation of variables, this method is usually employed to solve a class of linear partial differential equations”.

“A mathematical model is a depiction of a system using mathematical concepts and language. The procedure of developing a mathematical model is termed mathematical modelling. Mathematical models are used not only in natural sciences, but also in social sciences such as economics, psychology, sociology and political sciences. These models help to explain systems and to study the effects of different components, and to make predictions about behaviours.”

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