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31 July 2020
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Story Lacea Loader
As a public higher-education institution in South Africa with a responsibility to contribute to public discourse, the University of the Free State (UFS) will be presenting the 3rd UFS Thought-Leader Series in collaboration with Vrye Weekblad as part of the Vrystaat Literature Festival’s online initiative, VrySpraak-digitaal.
This year, higher-education institutions
globally are placed in the challenging context of COVID-19. Aware and grounded in the reality that the world will not return to the normality of pre-COVID-19, our responsibility as scholars still remains to contribute to public discourse and to offer
innovative solutions that will impact the lives of people nationally and globally in order to help them understand and adapt to a new world order.
Against this background and context, this year’s debates focus on ‘Post-COVID-19, Post-Crisis’,
with Health and Modelling, Politics, Economy, and Predictions for 2021 as the sub-themes. Placed in a COVID-19 context, and in lieu of the Vrystaat Arts Festival,
the series will be presented virtually in the form of one webinar per month during the period August 2020 to November 2020.
Date: 13 August 2020
Topic: Health
and Modelling
Time: 11:30-13:00
RSVP: Alicia Pienaar, pienaaran1@ufs.ac.za
Facilitator:
Max du Preez
Editor: Vrye Weekblad
Biography
Introduction and welcome:
Prof Francis Petersen
Rector and Vice-Chancellor, UFS
Panellists:
Prof Salim Abdool Karim
Director: Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA)
Chair: South African Ministerial Advisory Committee on COVID-19
Biography
Prof Glenda Gray
President and CEO: South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC)
Biography
Prof Felicity Burt
NRF-DST South African Research Chair in vector-borne and zoonotic pathogens research
Biography
Romania and UFS work together on diagnostic programme
2009-04-28
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Here are, from the left: Dr William Rae with Prof. Chirvase and Prof. Caramihai of the Romanian research team during their visit to Bloemfontein.
Photo: Supplied
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| A group of academics of Romania visited the Department of Medical Physics of the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Free State (UFS) recently. Proff. Mihai Caramihai and Ana Chirvase are senior researchers of the Facultatea de Automatica & Calculatoare, Universitatea Politehnica Bucuresti who are working together with Prof. Charles Herbst and Dr William Rae of the UFS on the project MAmmary Malignancy Modelling using Artificial intelligence, ROmania South Africa, or Mamma Rosa. It is part of a larger local project aimed at implementing a computer-aided diagnosis programme (CAD), designed within the UFS's Department of Medical Physics, and which will take into account some of the South African requirements for computerised diagnostic radiology support. The National Research Foundation (NRF) provided travel funding and Prof. Herbst and Dr Rae visited Bucharest in November 2008 to collaborate with the Romanians. The visiting Romanian researchers were involved in a similar project where they were planning to model the changes in tumours as they grow and as they are treated. Dr Rae says there are many synergies between the two departments. The project has many aspects and there are several possibilities for related sub-projects. As a result the UFS has been able to attract three people to be involved in the project and they will do their Ph.Ds with the UFS. On the visit to Bloemfontein the roles of the researchers in the project were defined and the programme for the three-year collaboration was established. The stimulus created as a result of this collaboration has resulted in projects that will continue for at least the next four years. |