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UFS April graduations and everything you need to know

07 April 2021 | Story Xolisa Mnukwa

Virtual graduation ceremonies for undergraduate and postgraduate students at the University of the Free State (UFS) who have completed their qualifications at the end of the 2020 academic year, will be broadcast from 19 to 22 April 2021. This will be the fourth virtual graduation hosted by the UFS since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Qualifications will be awarded in the form of certificates, diplomas, bachelor’s degrees, honours degrees, postgraduate diplomas, as well as master’s and doctoral degrees across all faculties.

In addition, three honorary doctorates will be conferred upon award-winning South African short-story writer, novelist, and poet – Dr Rudolf Johannes (Dolf) van Niekerk; retired Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa – Justice Zakeria Mohammed (Zak) Yacoob; and renowned business leader, founder, and chairperson of the private investment firms, Izingwe Capital and Izingwe Holdings – Dr Sipho Mila Pityana.

More than 9 000 qualifications will be awarded to students across all campuses, with the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences conferring the most qualifications. For a breakdown of the number of qualifications to be awarded per faculty on each day, see information below.

19 April 2021
Bloemfontein Campus (certificates, diplomas, bachelor’s degrees, honours degrees, and postgraduate diplomas)

Faculties: Economic and Management Sciences (1 198), Education (628), Health Sciences (219), the Humanities (1 191), Law (887), Natural and Agricultural Sciences (1 238), Theology and Religion (164)

→ Chancellor invitation 19 April 2021

20 April 2021
South Campus (certificates and diplomas)

Faculties: Economic and Management Sciences (87), Education (143), the Humanities (399)

→ Chancellor invitation 20 April 2021

21 April 2021
Qwaqwa Campus (certificates, diplomas, bachelor’s degrees, honours degrees,
postgraduate diplomas, master’s, and doctoral degrees)

Faculties: Economic and Management Sciences (87), Education (776), the Humanities (538), Natural and Agricultural Sciences (1 237)

→ Chancellor invitation 21 April 2021

22 April 2021
Bloemfontein Campus (master’s and doctoral degrees)
Faculties: Economic and Management Sciences (45), Education (12), Health Sciences (29), the Humanities (21), Law (21), Natural and Agricultural Sciences (112), Theology and Religion (21)

→ Chancellor invitation 22 April 2021

The UFS is looking forward to honouring all graduates during the upcoming virtual graduation ceremonies and would like to celebrate your milestones and successes virtually with you and your loved ones. The university further encourages all graduates to join us in celebrating the virtual graduations. See information further below for details on how to join in on the fun.

News Archive

Newly operational sequencing unit in genomics at UFS

2016-09-09

Description: Next Generation Sequencing Tags: Next Generation Sequencing

Dr Martin Nyaga and his research assistant,
Tshidiso Mogotsi in the Next Generation
Sequencing Laboratory.
Photo: Charl Devenish

The Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) unit at the UFS was established as an interdisciplinary facility under the Directorate for Research Development, Faculty of Health Sciences and Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences.

The aim of the NGS facility is to aid internal and external investigators undertaking studies on Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequencing, assembly and bioinformatics approaches using the more advanced Illumina MiSeq NGS platform.

The NGS unit became operational in 2016 and is managed by Dr Martin Nyaga and administered through the office of the Dean, Faculty of Health Sciences, under the leadership of Prof Gert Van Zyl. Dr Nyaga has vast experience in microbial genomics, having done his PhD in Molecular Virology.

He has worked and collaborated with globally recognised centres of excellence in Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic genomics, namely the J. Craig Venter Institute and the Laboratory of Viral Metagenomics, Rega Institute, among others.

The unit has undertaken several projects and successfully generated data on bacterial, viral and human genomes. Currently, work is ongoing on bacterial and fungal metagenomics studies through 16S rRNA sequencing.

In addition, the unit is also working on plasmid/insert sequencing and whole genome sequencing of animal and human rotaviruses. The unit has capacity to undertake other kinds of panels like the HLA, Pan-cancer and Tumor 15 sequencing, among others.

Several investigators from the UFS including but not limited to Prof Felicity Burt, Prof Wijnand Swart, Dr Frans O’Neil, Dr Trudi O'Neill, Dr Charlotte Boucher, Dr Marieka Gryzenhout and Dr Kamaldeen Baba are actively in collaboration with the NGS unit.

The unit has also invested in other specialised equipment such as the M220 Focused-ultrasonicator (Covaris), 2100 Bioanalyzer system (Agilent) and the real-time PCR cycler, the Rotor-Gene Q (Qiagen), which both the UFS and external investigators can use for their research.

Investigators working on molecular and related studies are encouraged to engage with Dr Nyaga on how they would like to approach their genomics projects at the UFS NGS unit.

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