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21 April 2022 | Story Lunga Luthuli | Photo Supplied
Lizandré Mulder
Lizandré Mulder, University of the Free State LLB graduate, does not believe in having a role model, but in striving to be a better version of herself.

Moving from Jansenville – a town outside Uitenhage – to Bloemfontein for her LLB studies, things got off to a shaky start for Lizandré Mulder. New in a ‘big town’, the ‘country girl’ felt out of her element and not used to big-city life. Thanks to her lecturers, the journey to a legal qualification at the University of the Free State (UFS) ended with an average final-year mark of 80% for the Law graduate.

Back in Jansenville, Lizandré’s neighbour nicknamed her ‘klein prokureurtjie (little lawyer)’ as she was growing up, because she had a ‘habit of arguing’, which motivated her to choose law as a career. She says, “arguing with facts earlier, has turned into a passion”. “The competitive side of me always wants to win; I guess that makes me the perfect candidate for a future advocate,” she says.

Managing undergraduate studies, Lizandré – who is also an accomplished athlete – says all she did was study and train. “The only thing I struggled with was my sleeping schedule, as I was constantly tired from hard training, and I studied till the morning hours while I had to wake up again early for morning training.”

The track, field, and cross-country runner has received numerous national medals for the sport and will unfortunately miss the invitation to the annual Excellence Awards in the Faculty of Law, as she will be competing in this year’s South African Athletics Championships in Cape Town on 22 April 2022.

Graduating with the LLB degree, Lizandré plans to finish her master’s degree with a possible topic on the legality of human gene editing in South Africa for the purposes of disease treatment or the prevention thereof.

Lizandré does not believe in having a role model, but to “always try to better myself in every aspect of life. I always believed that true inspiration and motivation come from within”.

After completing her master’s degree, Lizandré will decide on her future career path. She says: “I am still deciding whether I want to remain in Bloemfontein or relocate to Potchefstroom, as the latter has a law firm specialising in medical negligence, a field I would like to specialise in. Besides this, the two cities also boast the best athletics coaches in DB Prinsloo, Head of KovsieSport, and Jean Verster in Potchefstroom has mentored South African award-winning runner, Caster Semenya.

“Somewhere in the future, I definitely also plan on doing my doctoral degree in Law,” says Lizandré.

News Archive

Stochastic Modelling for Reliability from Russia
2013-12-20

 

 Prof Maxim (MS) Finkelstein’s
The Russian professor first visited our university in 1993 and loved the environment. For the last 15 years we were fortunate to have had a man of Prof Maxim (MS) Finkelstein’s (65) stature as part of our Department of Mathematical Statistics.

“I like the atmosphere, the environment and the people of the UFS,” says Prof Finkelstein. “The UFS is a real campus, not part of the city as a lot of other universities in South Africa.”

Prof Finkelstein completed his MSc in Mathematical Physics from the Leningrad State University in the USSR in 1971. Maths and Physics have been a passion of his since a young age. In 1979, Prof Finkelstein completed his PhD in Mathematical Theory of Reliability at Leningrad Elektropribor Institute. Before his career at our university, Prof Finkelstein was a Senior Researcher at St. Petersburg Elektropribor Institute and an Associate Professor at Leningrad Technological Institute.

His long list of publications includes over 170 papers and five books. His monograph Failure Rate Modelling for Reliability and Risk was published by Springer in 2008. More recently another monograph – which was co-authored with JH Cha – was published by Springer in April 2013 and is called Stochastic Modelling for Reliability: Shocks, Burn-in, and Heterogeneous Populations.

Prof Finkelstein’s research interests include mathematical theory of reliability, survival analysis, risk and safety modelling, stochastic processes and stochastics in demography. When asked about leisure and life outside of research, the devoted academic’s response was as follows…

“To have publications, you have to work all the time. I work half of Saturdays and most of Sundays,” Prof Finkelstein says. “I spend three months a year in Russia and Germany – mostly during the European summer – for my research.”
“But apart from that, I like reading – classical Russian authors mostly. I swim in the UFS’s swimming pool almost every day and I play tennis as well.”

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