Latest News Archive
Please select Category, Year, and then Month to display items
31 July 2020
|
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
A woman with a vision and dreams
2014-09-19
Louzanne Coetzee recently made Kovsie -history when she became the first blind woman to be elected to the SRC in the portfolio for Student Accessibility and Support. She has not even considered standing for the SRC before, though.
“I wanted to create awareness of disabled students on campus,” Louzanne says. “By running for SRC and this specific portfolio, I thought it would be a great way to do so.” She has a lot of ideas on how to make the portfolio function better and to link the accessibility and support braches of the portfolio.
Louzanne has a passion for leadership. “I think this is a great platform for me to live out my values.” She describes herself as dynamic, but admits that she often pushes herself very hard to achieve the goals she has set out for herself. “I’m also very competitive. But I believe I can make it work to my advantage by setting goals regarding my leadership position on campus to make them happen.”
Having won several gold medals at athletic track events, Louzanne also aims to be selected for the South African 2016 Paralympics team.
And the one dream after another coming true for her, arises from a firm belief in the right attitude.
“I believe that with one’s attitude one can achieve anything. My personal motto has always been ‘mind management is life management’. One of the greatest lessons I have ever learned is that everything is determined by your attitude. The latter determines how you live your life and handle situations.”