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05 December 2024 | Story Dr Cindé Greyling | Photo Kaleidoscope
MACE Winners 2024
From left to right: Burneline Kaars (Head: Employee Wellness and Organisational Development), Dr WP Wahl (Student Life Director), Linda Greyling (Senior Officer: Special Projects, Student Recruitment Services), Gerben Van Niekerk (Senior Officer: Kovsie Support Services), Malia Maranyane (Senior Officer: Undergraduate Marketing, Student Recruitment Services), Nomonde Mbadi (Student Recruitment Services Director), and Susan Van Jaarsveld (Senior Director: Human Resources).

On 28 November 2024, the University of the Free State (UFS) did it again – reigned as champions at the annual Marketing, Advancement and Communication in Education (MACE) Excellence Awards and walking away with two of the top awards: the MACE Award for Outstanding Research and the Severus Cerff Award for Consistent Excellence.

KovsieX was named the overall winner of the MACE Award for Outstanding Research. This award is made to the entry with the highest score in research, clearly demonstrating how research has supported the strategic objectives of the institution and the project. KovsieX is a multiplatform approach designed to leverage the strengths of diverse media channels. This digitalisation aligns with Vision 130, leveraging emerging technologies to enhance teaching and learning quality and efficiency of non-academic support structures and systems.

The UFS’ entries were of such high quality that the university won the sought-after Severus Cerff Award for Consistent Excellence. This award is based on the number of entries entered by an institution and the number and level of those entries winning awards. The award is therefore made to the institution with the highest success ratio.

Furthermore, the UFS Matriculant of the Year event received a Silver Award – entries scoring 5.75 or higher earn a Silver Award, placing this event among some of the top achievers in the events category. Three UFS entries received Gold Awards and were the winners in their respective categories: KovsieChat (Digital Channels), 2024 Women’s Day Breakfast (Events), and KovsieX (Stakeholder Engagement Campaigns). This is a magnificent achievement for the UFS.

"Winning a MACE award at this early stage is proof that KovsieX is not just meeting national standards – it’s setting them. If we can achieve this level of excellence now, imagine how we’ll compete on the global stage when the project is fully realised,” says Gerben van Niekerk, Student Media Manager.

Lacea Loader, Senior Director: Communication and Marketing and Coordinator of the MACE Excellence Awards, explained that a record number of entries were received for the Excellence Awards this year. “We are ecstatic about the direction of communication at the UFS and that the university has been able to maintain the quality of its entries in recent years,” says Loader.

The MACE Excellence Awards takes place annually as part of the MACE National Conference, recognising and celebrating excellence and the achievements of specialists and practitioners in marketing, advancement, and communication in the higher-education sector. This year, the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) hosted the conference from 27 to 28 November 2024.

In 2023, the UFS won 11 awards, including the Chairperson’s Award of Excellence. 

News Archive

Stress and fear on wild animals examined
2013-06-04

 

Dr Kate Nowak in the Soutpansberg Mountain
Photo: Supplied
04 June 2013

Have you ever wondered how our wild cousins deal with stress? Dr Kate Nowak, visiting postdoctoral researcher at the Zoology and Entomology Department at the UFS Qwaqwa Campus, has been assigned the task to find out. She is currently conducting research on the effects that stress and fear has on primate cognition.

The Primate and Predator project has been established over the last two years, following Dr Aliza le Roux’s (also at the Zoology and Entomology Department at Qwaqwa) interest in the effects of fear on primate cognition. Dr le Roux collaborates with Dr Russel Hill of Durham University (UK) at the Lajuma Research Centre in Limpopo and Dr Nowak has subsequently been brought in to conduct the study.

Research on humans and captive animals has indicated that stress can powerfully decrease individuals’ cognitive performance. Very little is known about the influence of stress and fear on the cognition of wild animals, though. Dr Nowak will examine the cognition of wild primates during actual risk posed by predators. This is known as the “landscape of fear” in her research.

“I feel very privileged to be living at Lajuma and on top of a mountain in the Soutpansberg Mountain Range. We are surrounded by nature – many different kinds of habitats including a tall mist-belt forest and a variety of wildlife which we see regularly, including samangos, chacma baboons and vervet monkeys, red duiker, rock hyrax, banded mongooses, crowned eagles, crested guinea fowl and cape batis. And of course those we don't see but find signs of, such as leopard, genet, civet and porcupine. Studying the behaviour of wild animals is a very special, and very humbling, experience, reminding us of the diversity of life of which humans are only a very small part,” said Dr Nowak.

At present, the research team is running Giving up Densities (GUD) experiments. This represents the process during which an animal forsakes a patch dense with food to forage at a different spot. The animal faces a trade-off between meeting energy demands and safety – making itself vulnerable to predators such as leopards and eagles. Dr le Roux said that, “researchers from the US and Europe are embracing cognitive ecology, revealing absolutely stunning facts about what animals can and can’t do. Hence, I don’t see why South Africans cannot do the same.”

Dr Nowak received the Claude Leon Fellowship for her project. Her research as a trustee of the foundation will increase the volume and quality of research output at the UFS and enhance the overall culture of research. Her analysis on the effect that stress and fear have on wild primates’ cognition will considerably inform the emerging field of cognitive ecology.

The field of cognitive ecology is relatively new. The term was coined in the 1990s by Les Real to bring together the fields of cognitive science and behavioural ecology.


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