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Building a research career with global impact

13 July 2023 | Story Andre Damons | Photo Samkelo Fetile

A visiting scholar from Trinity College Dublin in Ireland visited the University of the Free State (UFS) to work with staff members from the UFS Transformation of the Professoriate Mentoring Programme on identifying collaborations, writing, and building a research career.

Prof Catherine Comiskey, a professor in Healthcare Statistics from the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Trinity College Dublin and Academic Director of CHARM-EU – an EU-funded academic programme – held a writing retreat for participants in the Transformation of the Professoriate Mentoring Programme in the last week of June. She also worked with individual members to identify potential European and UK collaborators on various research projects. On Friday 30 June, she presented a lecture on building a research career with global impact.

Encouraging staff members

According to Dr Henriëtte van den Berg, Manager: Transformation of the Professoriate Mentoring Programme, Prof Comiskey encouraged colleagues to develop a research and publication strategy to ensure that they optimise the work they are doing, to look for opportunities to collaborate with colleagues across different disciplines, and to work together on publications and the supervision of postgraduate students.

“She also emphasised the importance of collaborating with people in industry, as they often have a rich source of data that is publishable. She highlighted the importance of being an ethical researcher. The workshop participants benefited from her passion and broad knowledge to start planning collaborations and to reflect on how they can make the work they are already doing work more for them. A group of workshop participants has already started working on a systematic review that they will conduct in collaboration with Prof Comiskey,” said Dr Van den Berg.

Share expertise

Prof Comiskey facilitated online writing interventions for the colleagues of the mentoring programme during COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. She was invited to the campus to share her expertise in quantitative methodology and transdisciplinary work.

Prof Comiskey completed a PhD in Mathematics and coordinates many interdisciplinary research teams, comprising applied mathematicians, statisticians, psychologists, medical doctors, sociologists, anthropologists, nurses, computer scientists, and healthcare employees. She has been selected as one of five international experts nominated by the European Commission to serve on the International Scientific Committee of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction.

She has 30 years’ experience of teaching, research, postgraduate supervision, and teaching to specialists and non-specialists in all areas of applied statistics, mathematics, and epidemiology. She is also a seasoned academic leader, having served as Research Director at Trinity College, Dublin for many years.

CHARM-EU is an EU-funded academic programme spanning five European universities to develop, run, and evaluate a new EU-wide model for Universities of the Future. This involves a new transdisciplinary master’s degree that addresses the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

News Archive

Enhancement of social justice focus at research colloquium

2010-10-07

At the third Education for Social Justice Research Colloquium the publication Praxis towards sustainable empowering learning environments in South were handed to Prof. Ezekiel Moraka, Vice-Rector: External Relations at the UFS. At this occasion were, from the left: Prof. Dennis Francis, Dean of the UFS Faculty of Education; Prof. Sechaba Mahlomaholo, Research Professor in the Faculty of Education Sciences at the North-West University; Prof. Moraka; and Dr Milton Nkoane, Senior Lecturer in the UFS Faculty of Education.
Photo: Leonie Bolleurs

This year, the University of the Free State (UFS) was the host for the Research Colloquium: Education for Social Justice for the very first time. It is the third time that this colloquium has been presented.

Prof. Ezekiel Moraka, Vice-Rector: External Relations at the UFS, opened the colloquium, stating that academics, through their research, are ultimately in a good standing to advise government on important issues such as social justice for them to address these issues accordingly.

Prof. Sechaba Mahlomaholo, Research Professor in the Faculty of Education Sciences at the North-West University, delivered the opening address on the theme: Validating community cultural wealth towards sustainable empowering learning environments for social justice. He said that the legacy of our recent past as South Africa still continues to haunt us, especially as exemplified in the dysfunctionalities that are rife in our education.

“With the colloquium we manage to bring together the ideas, thoughts, resources and efforts of educators and/or educationists concerned with the creation of a more equitable, equal, free, hopeful, peaceful and socially just society. Through our teaching, our community engagement and research activities we strive towards a more humane, caring, respecting and respectful South Africa and the world,” he said.

According to Prof. Mahlomaholo, education and its research are some of the most potent mechanisms at the very centre of social transformation. The papers at the colloquium focused on investigating, understanding and responding to issues of amongst others:

The medium of teaching and learning which continues to be a barrier to many learners to perform to the best of their abilities in the majority of the education institutions in South Africa;
Health, sexuality, HIV/Aids, stigmatisation and other deseases plaguing our communities currently;
Self-fulfilling prophecies and stereotypes about some learners not being as intelligent as the rest and this finally being reflected and confirmed in their poor academic achievements;
Differentiated levels of parental involvement in the activities of their children’s learning due to long absences from their families as they have to work in far-off places of employment;

Papers delivered at the colloquium moved beyond merely identifying the problems; they also suggested possible and plausible research-based solutions to these, such as integrating HIV/Aids education in curricula, listening to the aspirations of significant stakeholders such as mothers and parents generally in teaching and facilitating more rigorous community engagement practices.

At the colloquium gala dinner the book Praxis towards sustainable empowering learning environments in South Africa by authors Dr Milton Nkoane, Senior Lecturer in the UFS Faculty of Education, Prof. Mahlomaholo and Prof. Dennis Francis, Dean of the Faculty of Education at the UFS, was launched. The publication consists of a collection of the best peer-reviewed papers from a conference with the theme Creating sustainable empowering learning environments through scholarship of engagement. The main criterion for inclusion was that the paper should contribute to the theme by means of an original, tight, theoretical and empirical study conducted with the aim of informing the practice of creating sustainable empowering learning environments. The concrete cases examined in many of the chapters are very useful to helping readers understand the specific, on-the-ground concerns related to higher education and schools.

Media Release
Issued by: Leonie Bolleurs
Strategic Communication
Tel: 051 401 2707
Sel: 0836455853
Email: bolleursl@ufs.ac.za
30 September 2010

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