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13 May 2022 | Story Alicia Pienaar
Prof Vetrik
Prof Tomas Vetrik.

The Dean of the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences, Prof Danie Vermeulen, has the pleasure of inviting you to the inaugural lecture of Prof Tomas Vetrik. 

Topic: Extremal graph theory 

Event Details:
Date: 19 May 2022
Time: 17:30
Venue: Equitas Auditorium, UFS Bloemfontein Campus

RSVP:  Ms Marinda Venter on +27 51 401 2691 or email: VenterSM@ufs.ac.za  on or before Tuesday 17 May 2022.

Light refreshments will be served after the inaugural lecture. 


More about the speaker:

Tomas Vetrik received two scholarships from foreign countries during his PhD study. He spent one semester of his PhD study at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria, and two semesters at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. He was the only postgraduate student from Slovakia to receive a scholarship from the Israeli government in 2006. Tomas Vetrik joined the University of the Free State in 2014, after his postdoctoral research at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and working at the UniversityPretoria. His research area is graph theory. He is mainly focusing on the degree-diameter problem, graph indices, and metric dimension of graphs. He is an NRF-rated researcher and has produced about 75 research papers (approximately 25 of them as a single author).

Three PhD students and three MSc students have completed their studies under his supervision. He has presented seminar talks at 24 universities from 15 different countries. Please take note of our COVID-19 health and safety protocols (https://www.ufs.ac.za/return-to-campus ) when visiting the UFS campuses.


Please take note of our COVID-19 health and safety protocols (https://www.ufs.ac.za/return-to-campus ) when visiting the UFS campuses. 

News Archive

Visiting Professor, Piet Bracke, Speaks on Public Mental Health
2015-02-20

Piet Bracke

Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Ghent University in Belgium, Piet Bracke, recently visited the UFS to speak about his research on the Public mental health and comparative health research: between social theory and psychiatric epidemiology.

At the public lecture on Monday 16 February, Bracke stated that part of the sociological attention to mental health and well-being was rooted in the 19th century's romanticists' discontent with self and society. The classical and contemporary social theorists' views on the disconnection between culture and the ‘real’ self resembles the more recent evolutionary psychological assumptions about the maladaptation of  psychobiological mechanisms to contemporary societal arrangements.

In contrast to these perspectives, contemporary psychiatric epidemiological research has a strongly underdeveloped conception about the nexus between society and population mental health. Both perspectives, the social-theory-and-societal-discontent approach and the biomedical psychiatric epidemiological approach, have drawbacks. Starting from the pitfalls of the aforementioned perspectives, they have been exploring the challenges posed by the development of a macro-sociology of population mental health.

Recently, this research domain has received renewed attention of scholars inside as well as outside sociology. The rise of multi-country, multilevel datasets containing health-related information, as well as the growing attention on the fundamental social causes of health and illness, and the focus on population as opposed to individual health, has contributed to the revival of comparative public mental health research. Based on findings from their recent research, they have illustrated how taking the context into account is vital when exploring the social roots of mental health and illness. In addition, they have demonstrated how they can liberate a few so-called ‘control variables’ in risk factor epidemiology – e.g. gender, education, and age – from their suppressed status by linking them to core concepts of sociology. With their research, they hope to further the development of a macro-sociology of public mental health.

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