Dr Calvin Mudzingiri currently works as a senior Lecturer of Economics in the Department of Economics and Finance and is the current Assistant Dean in the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences (EMS) at Qwaqwa Campus (https://www.ufs.ac.za/econ/departments-and-divisions/economics-home/general/staff?pid=wIc6DlukCio%3D). He Joined the University of the Free State in January 2012. He completed his PhD in Economics with the University of the Free State (UFS) in 2019, MSc in Economics with the University of Zimbabwe (UZ) and (Collaborative Masters Programme for Anglophone Africa (CMAP) African Economic Research Consortium Joint Facility for Electives (AERC)(JFE)-Nairobi, Kenya -2008) in 2009, BSc Honours in Economics with the UZ in 2004 and Diploma in Education with specialisation in Mathematics with the UZ in 1998. The title of his PhD topic is: The impact of financial literacy on risk and time preferences and behavioral intentions.   He is currently supervising PhD, Masters and Honours Students. He is an external examiner for PhD, Masters, and examinations in several universities namely the University of Johannesburg, UKZN, NWU, University of Namibia, UNIZULU, NMMU, among others. Calvin’s research publications can be accessed on the following link: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=zU1TEiYAAAAJ. He has presented research paper in local and international conferences, published newspaper articles, peer reviews journal articles, is an Assistant Editor for Research Journal of Economic and Management Studies (RJEMS) and attended several training workshops offered by the University of Cape Town, Stellenbosch university and ERSA among others. Prior to joining UFS, Calvin worked for the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (2008-2011), Ministry of Agriculture (2005-2008) and Ministry of Education in Zimbabwe (1999-2001). He received the Edward Tiffy Scholarship at UFS and African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) scholarship at University of Zimbabwe. His research interests are in behavioral and experimental economics, poverty, and economics in general. He teaches intermediate microeconomics, macroeconomics (South African Macroeconomics policy issues), international economics, Research reports, and personal finance. He sits on several University Committees at Campus and institutional level.

Prof Mikateko Mathebula is a Y2 NRF-rated researcher and Associate Professor at the Centre for Development Support in the Higher Education and Human Development Research Programme. Through a capabilities lens, her work examines the relationship between processes of higher education, ‘development’, and human flourishing in the South African context, focusing on youth from low-income households and/or rural areas.  Recently completed projects include a photovoice scoping study on pursuing higher education in contexts of sociospatial exclusion, working with youth from an upgraded informal settlement in the Free State, and a study with student activists where digital storytelling and participatory videos were used to capture students’ aspirations for and articulation of universities as sustainable communities. Her latest book, Low-Income Students, Human Development and Higher Education in South Africa: Opportunities, Obstacles and Outcomes, which is co-authored by Melanie Walker, Monica McLean, and Patience Mukwambo, is based on the longitudinal Miratho project (2016–2021), which examined the factors and dynamics that influence higher education access, participation, and outcomes for low-income youth from rural areas and townships in South Africa.

Her current project, which is funded by the NRF (Thuthuka) investigates the contribution that universities make to the transformation of rural communities by exploring, describing, and documenting, through narratives, the post-university life trajectories of youth from rural areas in the Eastern Cape and Limpopo provinces.

Dr Maréve I. M. Biljohn is a Senior Lecturer and the Academic Head of the Department of Public Administration and Management at the University of the Free State. Dr Biljohn obtained her PhD titled  ‘Social Innovation and Service Delivery by Local Government: A Comparative Perspective’ in 2018 from the University of the Free State (UFS). Her PhD was partly completed at Ghent University in Belgium from 2015 to 2016 as a recipient of an Erasmus Mundus EU-SATURN PhD mobility scholarship. As her first major research on social innovation, Dr Biljohn’s PhD presented perspectives from the Global North and Global South regarding citizen participation in local government service delivery using the lens of social innovation. With South Africa’s current local government service delivery challenges, her research on social innovation as a solution to such challenges is contemporary and relevant.

2018 Dr Biljohn received the UFS Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences Emerging Researcher award. With her research trajectory in the field of social innovation, she obtained her NRF rating. Using the lens of social innovation and transformative social innovation, her research aims to contribute solutions to local government service delivery challenges and approaches to citizen participation in local service delivery governance. Dr Biljohn has also authored and co-authored book chapters regarding public sector leadership and leading self in South Africa’s local government VUCA environment. Her research has been presented at national and international conferences, and she has been an invited speaker and panelist at international conferences and public sector events. 

Since 2017, Dr Biljohn introduced her research foci on social innovation as part of her pedagogical approach through social processes embedded in collaborative learning. She applied gamification as a pedagogical approach to enhance student learning through students’ participation in developing and playing a game to enhance their learning. Not only a first in the Public Administration and Management curriculum offered at the University of the Free State, but Dr Biljohn praxis and research add to the research agenda and discourse for applying gamification to non-game contexts when teaching Public Administration and Management.

Dr Tatenda Shaleen Mhlanga is currently the Subject Head of Industrial Psychology in the Economic and Management Sciences Faculty at QwaQwa Campus.  She completed her PhD in Industrial Psychology with the University of Fort Hare (UFH) in 2019.  Her research interests include work and organizational wellbeing, personality, positive psychology and organizational behavior.  Her current project focuses on organizational agility, psychological empowerment, and thriving at work in the VUCA environment.  She has collaboratively published in local and international journals, presented in conferences, peer reviews journal articles and attend numerous training workshops and webinars.  She is also part of the Emerging Scholar Accelerator Program 2021 at UFS.  Currently, she is supervising PhD, Masters and Honours projects and is an external examiner both locally and internationally.

Dr Sekitla Daniel Makhasane was appointed by the Faculty of Education, at the University of the Free State in July 2018. He works as a lecturer in the school of education studies where he facilitates undergraduate and postgraduate modules in the discipline of Education Management, Leadership and Law. He also supervises honours, Masters and PhD students.

He obtained a Masters of Education  degree (Education Leadership, Management and Policy) in 2011 and a PhD (Education Leadership, Management and Policy) in 2015 from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The focus of his PhD research project was on the role of leadership in address school violence. He has attended and presented papers at national and international conferences.

He has publications in the form of book chapters, conference proceedings and journal articles. His research interest is on leadership and management practices and processes of tackling school violence and school improvement. He is a principal investigator in a multidisciplinary project about violence in rural schools. In 2019, seven honours students who took part in this project completed their research projects. All of them were supervised by Dr Makhasane. This research project is two-pronged: research and scholarship of engagement. As part of scholarship of engagement, Dr. Makhasane and other co-researchers facilitated a workshop for learner leaders about school violence in 2019.

He was appointed as the coordinator for Bed (Sen and FET) and PGCE programmes in January 2020. He serves in various committees in the university. He also serves as an internal and external examiner for Masters and PhD students. He was part of the abstracts review team for the 6th international conference on Education 2020 (3rd -5th April, 2020 Bangok, Thailand).

Dr Robert Mukuna works in Interdisciplinary and Integrated Educational Psychology, Inclusive Education, Educational Psychology, and Community Psychology. He is active in various research areas on psychological assessment, psychosocial factors, rural education, and multiculturalism. His research has produced several scientific research papers and has been published in accredited peer-reviewed international journals and two book chapters. He has presented his work at both national and international conferences. He is an academic champion of the International Collaboration Engagement between the University of the Free State (UFS) (South Africa) and the Ludwigsburg University of Education (Germany). He is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Education Foundations at the UFS.

He has supervised honours, master’s, and doctoral candidates. He is an NRF Funding holder and the Most Promising Emerging Researcher for 2020 in the UFS Faculty of Education. He has developed and adjusted learning study guides: Relationship in the Educational Context, inclusive for teaching and learning, and Psychology of Education modules related to the PQM programme for Qwaqwa Campus, implemented in 2021. He is the initiator of the International Journal of Studies in Psychology. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow with a Master’s in Educational Psychology from the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, and Honours in Industrial Psychology from the University of Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo. He serves as a Special Interest Group leader for the Psychosocialities of Teaching and Learning, Faculty of Education, UFS.

Current research: Teacher well-being and counselling programme
His current research explores enabling factors that influence teacher well-being to cope with adversities in rural high school districts in South Africa. It develops the teacher self-efficacy subscale as a specific measure to manage adversities. It evaluates the teacher counselling programme subscale as a practical instrument to cope with adversities in rural high school districts in South Africa. It finally explores how teacher self-efficacy can enable teachers to cope with work adversities at rural high schools in South Africa.

Dr Zukiswa Nhase is a Lecturer and Childhood Education Department Programme Director at the University of the Free State (UFS). She joined the UFS in 2020 from Rhodes University, Eastern Cape. She is involved in the teaching of both undergraduate and postgraduate students. In addition to being the Childhood Education Department Programme Director, she is also a Project Leader for the Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) and the Grade R Teaching Diploma programmes. 

Dr Nhase’s research focuses on Science Education and Early Childhood and Primary Education. Her research has focused on exploring opportunities and barriers to learning science concepts, knowledge, and skills in Early Childhood and Primary Education. Her research focus emanates from the home languages used for teaching and learning, the lack of resources in various schools and the opportunity to use a scientific-inquiry-based approach in teaching science in the early years of learning. For her PhD research project, she received the following research grants: the NRF Thuthuka Fund and the Rhodes University Research Grant. In her supervision role, Dr Nhase has successfully co/supervised and continues to supervise honours, master’s and PhD candidates in Science Education and Childhood Education.       

As part of her research development career, Dr Nhase was nominated in 2018 as a PhD representative by the Southern African Association for Research in Mathematics, Science and Technology Education (SAARMSTE). She held this leadership role for two years, serving in the Research Capacity Building Committee (RCBC). After completing her PhD in 2020, she was co-opted as an executive member of the RCBC. In n 2022, Dr Nhase was one of the team members selected for the Teaching Week organised by Ludwigsburg University of Education in Germany. Recently, in 2023, Dr Nhase was nominated by SAARMSTE to be the representative at NARST in the United States. She was also nominated act as a research mentor for PhD candidates at Sandra K. Abell Institute for Doctoral Students (SKAIDS), which took place at Clemson University, South Carolina, United States. The nomination is valid for two years.

Dr Henry James Nichols is a Senior Lecturer and holds the Head of the Department of Education Foundations position at the University of the Free State (UFS). Dr Nichols has supervised numerous honours and master’s studies for national and international students. His discipline is in Educational Psychology. His academic certifications include a Bcom in Human Resource Management (UFS), a Postgraduate Certificate in Education (UFS), Honours in Education Psychology (UNISA), and Master’s (UFS) and Doctoral Degrees (UJ) specialising in Education Psychology. 

Dr Nichols specialises in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Comprehensive Sexuality Education, and Education Policy Development for LGBTIQ youth in national and international schools. He has written extensively on these topics in both national and international journals. In addition, he has also presented his research at both national and international conferences. Dr Nichols is also a South African Education Research Association (SAERA) member.

Dr Nichols is actively involved in schools in his capacity of championing engaged scholarship and community service. He often presents workshops and training to schools and learners on gender and sexual diversity inclusion and responsible sexual education. In this capacity, he is, among other things, collaborating with the Ministry of Basic Education on sexuality education and directorship for social cohesion and equality in education. In addition, he also serves on the board of AGISANANG, a national non-profit organisation that focuses on female empowerment.

Since 2019, Dr Nichols has been based on the UFS Qwaqwa Campus, where he mostly focused on rural schools and the awareness and acceptance of gender and sexual diversity as well as social justice issues. 

Dr Lizemari Hugo-van Dyk is a senior lecturer at the School of Nursing at the University of the Free State (https://www.ufs.ac.za/health ), a position she has held since 2012. Her specialities include primary healthcare and nursing education, and she is currently the year coordinator for the second year undergraduate programme which focuses on primary healthcare.

Lizemari obtained her master’s degree in Nursing (with distinction) in 2016, and her PhD in Nursing in 2018. Her focus area is the facilitation of clinical learning (also known as preceptorship) in health sciences. She developed a training programme for clinical facilitators that accompany students placed in clinical facilities for work-integrated learning. The content of the programme was validated by interational nursing experts. From the programme an overartching project was developed which offers post-graduate students research opportunities in self-directed learning, the clinical learning environment, and emotional intelligence.  Nationally this training programme has been presented to various educators based at twenty-five institutions that include the Department of Health, public and private nursing colleges, hospitals, and universities. She has presented her research at both national and international conferences, and  has published articles on this subject.

Dr Angélique Lewies works in her research in Interdisciplinary and Integrated Molecular Biology, Biochemistry, and Toxicology. She is actively engaged in various areas of pharmaceutics, including biochemical, cellular, and whole-animal models, focusing on cancer, infectious disease, and, more recently, cardiovascular disease. Her research has led to the publication of several scientific research papers in accredited, peer-reviewed international journals and two book chapters. She has presented her work at both national and international conferences. During her Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (2018) at the Centre of Excellence for Nutrition, North-West University, she received a SARECO (Swiss–African Research Cooperation) Visiting Research Fellowship award to conduct research in both South Africa and Switzerland. She was appointed Lecturer at the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the end of 2019 and promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2023. She has successfully co-supervised two master’s students and one doctoral candidate and hosted three Postdoctoral Research Fellows. Her current fields of interest are tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, and 3D cardiac organoid cell-culture model development for drug-induced cardiotoxicity biomarker identification. The National Research Foundation and the UFS Interdisciplinary Grant fund her research. She is registered as a Professional Natural Scientist with the South African Council for Natural Scientific Professions (SACNASP).

Contribution to previous research: Pharmaceutical formulations and drug interaction studies

Her previous research focused on using antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) as adjuvants for conventional antibiotics and cancer treatment with greater selectivity than conventional chemotherapy agents. Strategies to strengthen our current arsenal of antibiotics and chemotherapy agents were investigated. The use of nanostructured lipid carriers to deliver peptide drugs was investigated and compared to the use of solid lipid nanoparticles. The study also focused on the synergistic interactions between AMPs and current antibiotics and chemotherapy agents. 

Current research: Cardiac disease modelling and regenerative medicine

Her current research aims to develop in vitro (cell culture) and small animal cardiovascular disease models for drug safety and efficacy studies. Cardiovascular toxicity is a leading cause of the market removal of drugs and especially affects chemotherapy drugs. She focuses on measuring the cardiovascular effects of pharmacological substances ex vivo using isolated heart perfusion systems (Langendorff system) in cardiovascular and non-cardiovascular rat models of heart disease. She is also focused on developing high-throughput human cardiac organoid models for disease modelling, drug-induced cardiotoxicity biomarker identification and drug screening, and for use in regenerative medicine applications in combination with tissue engineering strategies.

Dr. Nigel Aminake Makoah, PhD, Pr.Sci.Nat  is an academic and researcher affiliated with the Division of Virology within the Faculty of Science at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. His primary area of expertise lies in the realm of therapeutic discovery and assay development for combatting infectious diseases.

Before his current role, Dr. Makoah held a pivotal position as a Senior Protein Biochemist at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in Johannesburg. In this capacity, he was responsible for overseeing the design and production of intricate proteins essential for the isolation of rare HIV-specific B cells using flow cytometry, a crucial aspect of the antibody discovery project.

His academic journey commenced with the completion of a master's degree in Biochemistry at the University of Yaoundé I in Cameroon in 2006. Following this, he embarked on a collaborative project between the Walter Reed Johns Hopkins Cameroon Program (WRJHCP) and the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, USA. The project aimed to unravel the origins of malignant malaria, a significant public health concern.

In 2009, Dr. Makoah relocated to Germany, where he pursued and successfully obtained a PhD in Infection and Immunity from the University of Wuerzburg in 2012. During his doctoral studies, he conducted groundbreaking research into novel pharmacological compounds with dual activity against the malaria parasite and the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), the pathogen responsible for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Additionally, he played a pivotal role in characterizing the malaria parasite's proteasome, potentially opening avenues for new therapeutic targets.

In recognition of his academic excellence, Dr. Makoah was awarded the prestigious Georg Forster Postdoctoral Fellowship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Subsequently, he joined RWTH Aachen University, where he collaborated closely with colleagues at the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology (IME). Together, they developed an antimalarial screening platform focusing on two critical targets: the malaria proteasome and the developing gametocyte.

In 2014, Dr. Makoah made the move to the Department of Chemistry within the Institute of Infectious Diseases and Molecular Medicines at the University of Cape Town. During this tenure, he received both the NRF/DST Innovation Postdoctoral Award and The Carnegie Corporation's 'Developing the Next Generation of Academics' Fellowship. These fundings supported his efforts to assess the pharmacokinetic properties of drug candidates and identify potential drug targets, with the overarching goal of discovering new molecules to combat tuberculosis.

With a wealth of experience in protein biochemistry and drug discovery, Dr. Makoah is committed to making significant contributions to the global endeavor to prevent and treat infectious diseases, further solidifying his position as a prominent figure in the field of infectious disease research and therapeutics.

Dr Anke van der Merwe is a registered Physiotherapist with the Health Professions Council of South Africa since 2009 and has been in full-time employment at the University of the Free State (UFS) since June 2014. Dr van der Merwe occupied an academic position as a Lecturer within the Department of Physiotherapy from 2014 to 2021. Here, she supervised and examined postgraduate students and trained future physiotherapists through coursework and clinical work. She completed her doctoral studies in the Department of Physiotherapy (UFS) in 2021 with a thesis titled ‘A Framework for the Integration of Simulation in Undergraduate Physiotherapy: Contextualised for South Africa’. The research emphasises the need for a curriculum and an authentic simulation-based learning experience to optimise future-focused graduate preparation. The final product is a credible and contextualised framework for integrating simulation in the South African undergraduate physiotherapy programme. Although it is generic, it may be applicable for use in any healthcare programme.

In 2021, she was appointed as Undergraduate Programme Lead in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at the UFS. She remains directly involved in undergraduate teaching and learning, as well as supervising and examining postgraduate students. In a rapidly changing healthcare and tertiary education milieu, she continues to explore the acceptance, impact, and sustainability of healthcare simulation and digitalisation in enhancing healthcare teaching practices. Being passionate about teaching and learning, she is also involved in curriculum development and revision, focusing on graduate attribute enhancement through interprofessional engagement. 

Dr van der Merwe remains an active member of the Southern African Association of Health Educationalists (SAAHE), and her research has led to the publication of several research papers in national and international scientific peer-reviewed journals (nationally and internationally) and national and international conference presentations. Dr van der Merwe has secured research funding from the National Research Foundation (Thuthuka Grant) and institutional funding through the Teaching and Learning Strategic Digitalisation Fund to further her research both in the past and present. In 2021, she also received the runner-up spot at the Centre for Teaching and Learning Awards (UFS) in the Research in Learning and Teaching: Beginner category.  She holds a Teaching and Learning Fellowship at the UFS in the advanced scholar track. She remains actively involved in collaborative teaching and learning research projects within the Faculty of Health Sciences and on an interfaculty level.

Current research projects include investigating the creation of an interactive, interprofessional space for preclinical skills training for healthcare students, the development of a simulation-based educational intervention for improving librarians’ professional communication as well as the development of a simulation debriefing programme for health sciences educators: A middle-range theory. Her passion for teaching and learning and the improvement of the student experience remain her focus in both her day-to-day and research endeavours.

Dr Krishnan Anand, DTech, has been a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemical Pathology, Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Free State (UFS) since September 2019. Dr Anand also participated in the Future Generation Professoriate Group (FGP) at the UFS. He is an internationally recognised researcher working at the forefront of global health by aligning his research with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3: ‘Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages’, which helps him to produce relevant research and lifesaving 21st-century metabolic medicines. Dr Anand’s passion lies in nanoscience with an emphasis on translational research. 

His interdisciplinary work involves the integration of clinical chemistry, medical biochemistry, bioinformatics, and nanobiotechnology into his research, which has allowed him to produce results/literature that is of international quality and standard. Dr Anand leads the Precision Medicine Integrative Nano Diagnostics (P-MIND) laboratories, which is currently engaged in biological functions of extracellular vesicles (EVs) in cellular studies conducted under supraphysiological conditions, biomarker discovery through EVs derived from liquid biopsies and the role of circulating biomarkers in disease development. This work is important not only for diagnoses but also for treatment monitoring. Studies are also being conducted in OMICS technologies, epigenetics, toxicology, interpretation of biomolecules by hyphenated techniques, and the recent development of nanosensors in breath biopsy analysis for early and non-invasive disease diagnosis. P-MIND is actively contributing to nanopathology and nanodiagnostics.

From November 2014 to November 2016, Dr Anand served as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Durban University of Technology (DUT), after which he joined the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) as a Senior Researcher at the Discipline of Medical Biochemistry and Chemical Pathology from January 2017 to August 2019. In January 2020, he received the prestigious Innovation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the Department of Science and Innovation (DSI) and the National Research Foundation (NRF) for his research at the UFS. In 2021, he was awarded the NRF-Y1 rating for Next Generation Researchers and the NRF Y-Rated Incentive Award for Early Career Researchers in 2022. 

Dr Anand has received several research grants since he arrived at the UFS, the most significant being a research grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) as the Lead Agency to support his research from 2023 to 2026, and most recently, Technology Innovation Agency (TIA) seed funding for his translational research and the NRF-Y-rated supporting grant from 2023 to 2026. Due to his research and clinical expertise, Dr Anand has 135 research outputs, including several scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals, has authored book chapters, and is the editor of seven books (published by Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley respectively). He holds two patents for his work. Of the aforementioned research outputs, 80% of the publications rank in the top Q1 and Q2 in their respective disciplines, and he has a Google Scholar H-index of 28 and a Scopus H-index of 24. In addition to research, he has successfully supervised and mentored master's and doctoral students and has hosted Postdoctoral Research Fellows.
In the latest list published by Stanford University, Dr Anand was named in the Top 2% of the most infuential scientst worldwide.

As a researcher, Dr Anand has received various awards in academia, such as the Best Postdoctoral Researcher Award (DUT) in 2016, the Young Scientist Award from the Pearl Foundation for Educational Excellence (India) in 2016, and the Top Publisher Award (DUT) in 2017. At the UFS, he is a Faculty of Health Sciences Executive Committee member and serves on the Interdisciplinary Research Evaluation Panel. He is also a reviewer of the NRF Rating Evaluation Applications and Grant Proposals from the Auckland Medical Research Foundation (AMRF –New Zealand). 

Dr Anand serves the international scientific community as a review editor of eLife (Africa Region), special issue editor in international peer-reviewed journals, and as an associate editor of Bentham Science Publishers. In addition to this, he belongs to several distinguished societies, such as the American Chemical Society (ACS), the South African Chemical Institute: Professional Chemistry Membership (PrChemSA), the Royal Chemical Society (MRSC), and the International Society for Extracellular Vesicles (ISEV). He was on the advisory board of the International Conference on Nanomedicine (ICON), a Convenor of Advanced Nanomaterials for Energy, Environment and Healthcare Applications (ANEH) and a Bioeconomy Youth Ambassador to the International Advisory Council on Global Bioeconomy (IACGB). Dr Anand’s collaborative network includes (but is not limited to) institutions on a national level such as UKZN, and internationally in India, Australia, China, South Korea, and the United States.

Dr Martin P Rossouw is the Head of the Department of Art History and Image Studies, University of the Free State (UFS), a Senior Lecturer in Film and Visual Media. He is an NRF Y-rated scholar (2023–2028), the international book series Contemporary Cinema editor, and an editorial board member of the journal Short Film Studies. His scholarly interests include film and philosophy, film ethics, image and media theory, and short-form media.

An early landmark in his academic career was when he received the Humanities Dean’s Medal for his Master’s in the hybrid field of Philosophy of Film in 2012. In 2014, following his master's degree, he was the recipient of a 22-month Erasmus Mundus EU–SATURN PhD scholarship in the Netherlands, as part of a joint PhD agreement between the University of Groningen and the University of the Free State—which, in 2016, was extended by another year due to a scholarship from the Graduate School of the Humanities at the University of Groningen. 

Upon his return to South Africa, when he was appointed at the UFS in January 2017, he was in the mid-to-late stages of completing his PhD thesis on the transformational ethics of film. In March 2019, he defended his thesis at the University of Groningen, whereupon he received his PhD degree cum laude. His work was also shortlisted for the annual Wierenga-Rengerink Prize for the best PhD thesis at the University of Groningen.

Since the defence of his PhD, Dr Rossouw has expanded his research profile and international collaboration network on several fronts. In addition to several article publications, he published his first monograph, Transformational Ethics of Film: Thinking the Cinemakeover in the Film-Philosophy Debate, in Brill’s longstanding Value Inquiry book series in 2021. A further highlight was the 2023 publication of What Film is Good For: On the Values of Spectatorship with the University of California Press, a volume that he co-edited with Julian Hanich and which features over 30 essays by some of the most illustrious names in film studies across the globe.

In April 2021, Rossouw was the editor/convener of a panel (or ‘theme week’) on ‘lyric videos’ for the international forum In Media Res. In October 2021, he guest-edited the special issue, ‘Watchmen, From Co-Mix to Remix’, for Literature/Film Quarterly – the longest-running international journal devoted to Adaptation Studies. Moreover, in May 2023, he co-edited another In Media Res theme week on the burgeoning topic of ChatGPT and generative AI with Rick de Villiers. 

In terms of engaged scholarship, Rossouw’s research over the past few years has broadened into the field of short film, and in 2020 he was invited to the 32nd Minimalen Short Film Festival in Trondheim, Norway, as both a speaker at the Short Film Studies Symposium and a jury member of the international competition. Moreover, in August 2021, he was appointed as the series editor of Brill’s Contemporary Cinema book series, with an editorial board featuring several prominent film studies scholars from the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. In addition, as of November 2021, he is also an invited editorial board member of the Intellect journal, Short Film Studies, which is the only international journal dedicated to the study of short film.

Dr Rick de Villiers is a senior lecturer in the Department of English, University of the Free State. He holds a PhD in English literature from Durham University (UK) and has an established research profile in the areas of modernist and contemporary literature. He is an NRF Y-1 rated scholar and the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles, one book chapter, and one monograph, Eliot and Beckett’s Low Modernism: Humility and Humiliation (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). 

His monograph is the seventh book to appear in Edinburgh University Press’s ‘Other Becketts’. The central question behind this book and much of Rick’s other writing concerns the relation between humility and humiliation, particularly in modernist literature. Arguing both that humility impels humiliation and, conversely, that states of humiliation may invite humility, Rick traces these cognate terms across three categories: the affective, the ethical, and the aesthetic. Among recent publications to consider the social and philosophical significance of humility, Rick’s research stands apart in providing a literary perspective. While it makes a direct contribution to modernist studies, the disciplinary intersections of his work invite a broad constituency of readers - from literary scholars to affect theorists, from philosophers to experts in the medical humanities.

Since publication, the book has received highly favourable reviews, both locally and abroad. Prof. Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania) writes that it is a ‘groundbreaking book that proposes a reframing of the entire field of modernism’; Prof. Mike Marais (Rhodes) has called it a ‘deeply impressive, highly original and erudite study’. In 2023, Eliot and Beckett’s Low Modernism received an honourable mention at the ASSAF Humanities book awards. 

Rick is currently working on his next book project, provisionally titled The Cultured Cringe: South African Literature and Embarrassment. For more information, visit his personal website: https://www.rickdevilliers.com/.

Dr Nonhlanhla Dlamini works as a lecturer in the Department of English, Qwaqwa Campus. She obtained her PhD in African Literature at the University of Witwatersrand, served as a lecturer at Wits and a GES research fellow at the University of Johannesburg. She is a recipient of the ACLS American Humanities Program fellowship and is currently working on her book manuscript on the transformation of Black South African masculinities. She has published a number of journal articles on gender studies. Her research interests are literary studies and theory, Black literatures from Africa and its Diasporas, African masculinities studies, cultural and gender studies

Dr Divane Nzima joined the University of the Free State in May 2020. He works as a Lecturer and Subject Head in the Department of Sociology at the Qwaqwa Campus. Dr Nzima is an NRF-rated researcher who holds a Y2 rating. His research and teaching interests span various disciplines such as Sociology, Demography, and Development Studies. He has published research on the intersection of migration and development, family dynamics and parenting, the well-being of the elderly in resource-constrained countries, artisanal mining, and agricultural value chains. Dr Nzima has also taken an interest in Political Sociology with a keen interest on the nature and methods of political contestations to wield political power in environments always in election mode.

Dr Nzima is also a member of the Now Generation Network under the Mo Ibrahim Foundation. The Now Generation network is a collective of young people across Africa who are called upon to participate and be heard in several platforms in Africa and internationally. The Now Generation Network is key to the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, as it feeds into all aspects of the foundation’s work, from research to high-level stakeholder engagement.

Dr Danré Strydom is a Senior Lecturer at the Odeion School of Music.  She obtained her PhD in Music.

Danrè Strydom has established herself as one of South Africa’s premier solo, chamber and orchestral musicians through her global concert experience. Born in South Africa, she began her musical training in neighboring country Namibia. After attending the Interlochen Arts Camp, USA, she began her formal studies with Heinrich Armer at the University of the Free State in South Africa. She furthered her studies at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, where she worked with renowned clarinetists Eli Eban and Eric Hoeprich. She holds separate Master’s Degrees in Clarinet, Early Clarinet – and Bass Clarinet Performance from the Royal Conservatory at Ghent University, completed under the guidance of Eddy Vanoosthuyse. Danré completed her PhD in clarinet performance at the Odeion School of Music, UFS. During her studies in Namibia and South Africa, she has won numerous awards, including the ATKV cultural diversity award, FAK music award, R. Muller award for cultural and academic excellence and the First National Bank Prize of excellence. Danre has performed as soloist with various orchestra in South Africa and Europe and is an avid chamber musician.

After playing clarinet/bass clarinet for the award-winning Brussels Philharmonic from 2009 to 2013, she accepted a position as woodwind lecturer at the University of the Free State’s Odeion School of Music. Danré is the South African National Chair of the International Clarinet Association as well as the Continental (Africa) chair. She is a Buffet Crampon Artist, being the first South African representative and is currently principal clarinetist of the Free State Symphony Orchestra.

Except for her creative research outputs, her research interests also include early clarinet research as well as music and psychology. As part of the UFS emerging scholar accelerating program, she aims to publish research that focus on how mental health, the art of listening, religion and the roll of the accompanist influences an individual’s musicality and music interpretation skills.

Dr Rebecca Swartz is a Senior Lecturer in the History Department. She completed her PhD in 2015 at the University of London, funded by the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission. Since then, she has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Cape Town, Stellenbosch University, and the University of the Free State. She was appointed Senior Lecturer in History in September 2020. 

Dr Swartz’s research has focused on histories of education, childhood, race, and labour in the British Empire during the 19th century. Her first monograph, Education and Empire: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies, 1833–1880, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019. It is the first study of colonial education in the 19th-century settler colonies from a comparative perspective. The book illustrates how educational institutions and practices were deeply implicated in making racial categories in the colonies of settlement. This monograph received two major international prizes: the Grace Abbott Book Prize from the Society for the History of Children and Youth and the First Book Prize from the International Standing Committee on the History of Education. It was also nominated for the Kevin Brehony Book Prize from the History of Education Society. 

Dr Swartz is working on a second monograph, provisionally titled Children of the Cape Colony: Emancipation, Labour and Freedom in the British Empire, 1820–1850. Between 1830 and 1850, what it meant to be a child fundamentally changed across Britain’s expanding empire. This book investigates ideas about children and childhood in the Cape colony in the context of slave emancipation. This book is under contract with Bloomsbury Academic Press. 

Dr Swartz has published articles in various local and international journals, including Slavery & Abolition, Southern African Historical Journal, History Workshop Journal, and the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, as well as in edited book collections. She has also presented this work at both local and international conferences. She serves as Book Review Editor for History of Education and as an Editorial Board of Historia member. She is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Society for the History of Children and Youth. She is a Y1-rated scholar.

Dr Rika van Zyl has been a Lecturer at the University of the Free State since 2010, starting at the School of Financial Planning Law. She has been the Programme Director of the Advanced Diploma in Estate and Trust Administration at the School since 2020. After completing her Postgraduate Diploma in Financial Planning, she completed her master’s studies in 2013 on the rights of named beneficiaries in life insurance contracts – a form of contract regarded as a stipulatio alteri. She was awarded CFP® (Certified Financial Planner) status in 2011 and FPSA® (Fiduciary Specialist of Southern Africa) in 2019. 

She completed her PhD in the Department of Private Law in 2017 on the influence of the stipulatio alteri on the inter vivos trust in South Africa with suggested solutions for better regulation. As a Senior Lecturer, her specialisation research fields include the Law of Trusts and the Law of Succession. 

She received a EUROSA Scholarship in 2015 to gain specialised knowledge in Utrecht, the Netherlands on the stipulatio alteri for a month during her doctoral studies. Dr van Zyl has published several peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters in textbooks and presented papers at numerous national and international conferences. She supervised several master’s students on related topics. Law firms in South Africa have sought her legal opinion on Trust Law matters. She participates actively in the fiduciary industry with regular presentations to financial firms or conferences and as Vice-Chair of the Central Region for FISA (Fiduciary Institute of Southern Africa). 

Dr Prince Sarpong is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Financial Planning Law.  He obtained his PhD in Finance. His research interests are in the fields of behavioral finance, financial markets behavior, law and finance and financial psychology. He is an editor to a forthcoming book, Theories and Practices in Financial Therapy, with Springer Nature Switzerland AG as the publisher. He is also working on a concept dubbed Financial Planning from a African Customary Perspective, with the aim of incorporating African customary concepts in current financial planning practices. This concept is gaining some traction and in October 2021, he was the guest speaker at Allan Gray Business Development Managers’ Conference where he shared his ideas on this concept.

His contributions to previous research include the following papers: Against the Herd where he investigated the performance of contrarian equity funds in South Africa relative to their peers. In Legal Theory of Finance: Evidence for Global Financial Markets, he applied network theory to test the extent of interconnectedness in global financial networks. His doctoral studies titled Trading in Chaos: Analysis of Active Management in a Fractal Market, heapplied concepts in Chaos Theory to study the Low Volatility Anomaly on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

Dr Catherine S. Namakula is currently a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Public Law, University of the Free State (UFS). She is a justice-focused scholar and an independent mandate holder of the Human Rights Council, sitting on the UN Working Group of experts on people of African descent since 2021. She is published and cited in criminal justice, an area in which she is teaching at the UFS Faculty of Law. 

Dr Namakula has served in several countries, including Ghana, South Sudan, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Uganda, as a government advisor, human rights training facilitator, and racial justice advocate. She is leading pioneering research in fair trial language rights in Africa and international criminal trials, race as intersectionality in criminal justice, and Africa’s reparations agenda. She has previously worked with the Max Planck Foundation for the Rule of Law, Heidelberg; the University of Fort Hare, East London; the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law, Freiburg; the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and Public International Law, Heidelberg; and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

Dr Surina Esterhuyse is a senior lecturer in the Centre of Environmental Management.  Her research interest is Water resources management and protection during unconventional oil and gas extraction.

Contribution to previous research
Surina Esterhuyse was project leader of the Water Research Commission project to develop a Fracking vulnerability map and monitoring framework, was co-editor of the book ‘Hydraulic fracturing in the Karoo: Critical legal and environmental perspectives’ and was co-author of the Strategic environmental assessment for shale gas in the Karoo. Currently, her research focuses on the regulation of fracking to protect groundwater resources and she is part of the project team developing a regional groundwater monitoring network for the Karoo.

 

Dr Andri Corné van Aardt was appointed in 2017 as lecturer at the Department of Plants Sciences’ Botany division of the University of the Free State. She obtained a master’s in Ecology in 2010 and a Ph.D. in Ecology in 2016 (Vegetation ecology of the putative palaeo-Kimberley and palaeo-Modder rivers and their catchments, Free State, South Africa). Her MSc (2011) and PhD (2017) degrees were both awarded the E.M. van Zinderen Bakker prize for outstanding studies in Botany. She was promoted to senior Lecturer level in January 2021.

She has attended several international and local workshops to deepen her knowledge of modern and palaeo-ecology. She has successfully supervised three Masters and several Honours students on a wide variety of topics in modern and palaeo-ecology. Currently, she has several masters and Ph.D. students working on discipline-specific and interdisciplinary projects in both modern and palaeo-ecology.

Dr van Aardt has authored, co-authored and published various peer-reviewed conference papers (7), journal articles (7) and magazine articles (1). Dr van Aardt’s research focuses on combining modern and palaeo-ecology to better understand the environment we live in today. Her research has involved collaborations with the Department of Environmental Affairs, the South African National Biodiversity Institute, Wits University, Texas State University and the University of Tubingen

Dr van Aardt teaches several undergraduate and postgraduate modules focused on the environment and more specifically, vegetation from the Quaternary to present.

Dr Christopher Amoah is a Lecturer at the Department of Quantity Surveying and Construction Management at the University of the Free State (UFS). Christopher has a Bachelor’s in Land Economy from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana. He entered the construction industry after working as a Valuer for three years. In 2006, he worked as a Project Accountant in a design and build construction firm in Accra, Ghana. In 2010, Dr Amoah moved to South Africa to pursue his Master’s in Project Management at the University of Pretoria and graduated in 2012. While pursuing his master’s, he was employed as a Junior Construction Project Manager in a consultancy firm in Durban, where he was promoted to a Senior Project Manager in 2013. While still working as a Project Manager, he enrolled for a PhD in Construction Management at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University and graduated in April 2017. His PhD research topic is ‘Public Procurement Reforms in Ghana: Impact on the Local Construction Industry’. Dr Amoah has over ten years’ of experience in the construction industry and has supervised several honours and master’s students with different research topics. 

Since 2018, he has supervised several honours and master’s students with different research topics. His research areas include public procurement, project management, and sustainable construction. He has successfully supervised and graduated 30 honours and 11 master’s students. He currently supervises 13 honours, 16 master’s, and 3 PhD students. He has also authored and co-authored 60 papers (26 published papers in peer-reviewed accredited journals and two book chapters [in print] and presented 32 conference papers at local and international conferences). In collaboration with other staff, Dr Amoah received funding from the Central Research Fund at the UFS in 2018 to undertake a research project. He serves as a paper review panel member for four local and 27 international journals and an Acta Structilia editor. Christopher also serves as an external examiner and moderator for universities in South Africa.

Dr Francois Deacon is a senior lecturer at the Department of Animal, Wildlife and Grassland Sciences in the Faculty of natural and Agricultural Sciences since 2010. He was nominated on multiple occasions as the best lecturer at the UFS and received the award in 2018. Dr Deacon considers himself as a habit ecologist, focusing on the spatial ecology of wild mammals.

He has many projects with collaborations from institutions worldwide, and for this he has built a multispecialist research team of 30 scientists form 10 different countries. His long-term research and contribution to save the giraffe and rhino from becoming extinct in the wild on the African continent has received extensive coverage in the popular press and has led to three wildlife documentaries made on his research by National Geographic and presentations at international conferences. His research has led to the collection of data and the description of behavior that has never before been documented.

Dr Deacon have published 12 International articles and many other formats of informal articles with over 9.7 million reads/views in 2018. Some of the articles have been accepted in high impact journals such as Current Biology (IF = 9.193, Q1 ranked) and BMC Evolutionary Biology (IF = 3.027, Q1 ranked). His work has been presented at many conferences with 41 National oral presentations, 12 International oral presentations. He is a member of the South African Council for Natural Scientific Professions (SACNASP - Pr.Sci.Nat. Ref: 400132/12), Grassland Society of South Africa (GSSA), Giraffe and Okapi Specialist Group (GOSG), International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Species Specialist Group (SSG) the South African Wildlife Management Association (SAWMA), Wildlife Ranching South Africa (WRSA), Field Guide Association of South Africa (FGASA no 5567), Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism (DEAT no FS0038).

In 2018 he was nominated for the international La Roe award, also called the SCB Awards (recognition for a special achievement in conservation and for a significant contribution to the field of conservation biology). In 2018 he was shortlisted for the Fulbright scholarship in the United States. To date, 9 master students and 1 PhD student have graduated under his supervision with 7 MSc and 2 PhD's to follow. Even if he only recently started publishing, his research gate profile indicate 16.41 with 9 612 reads and with 108 Citations at the time of this biography.

Dr Abraham R Matamanda (PhD Urban and Regional Planning) is an NRF Y2-rated Urban and Regional Planner who also trained as a social ecologist. He received his BSc (Hons) degree in Rural and Urban Planning from the University of Zimbabwe. Dr Matamanda is also a master’s graduate from the Centre for Applied Social Sciences at the University of Zimbabwe, where he received his MSc in Social Ecology. He subsequently pursued his doctoral studies in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of the Free State (UFS). Dr Matamanda is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography, where he teaches Urban Geography modules. His multidisciplinary research employs systems thinking, political ecology and economy to explore urban governance and planning issues, climate change adaptation, informal Global South urbanism and urban food systems.

Dr Matamanda is currently the editor of the Town Planning Journal published by the UFS and also serves on the academic editorial board of Plos Water Journal. He is a Fellow of the Department of Higher Education and Training Future Professoriate Programme Phase 1, Third Cohort. He also sits on the Executive Committee of Kovsie Journals at the UFS. Dr Matamanda is the South African PI for a global collaborative research project exploring how children and young people from poor households have adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on food, education, and play/leisure (https://panexyouth.com/). 

Dr Matamanda has published 36 peer-reviewed articles in journals including Land Use Policy, Journal of Planning Education and Research, and GeoJournal, among others. He has also published 22 book chapters and co-edited and co-authored the following books: Urban Geography in Postcolonial Zimbabwe: Paradigms and Perspectives for Sustainable Urban Planning and Governance (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-71539-7); Housing and Technology: A special focus on Zimbabwe (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09098-1); and Urban and Transit Planning (3rd Edition) – City Planning: Urbanization and Circular Development (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20995-6). He has presented 19 papers at national and international scientific conferences. He successfully supervised five master’s and two PhD students.  

 

Dr W.A. Lombard is an Agricultural Economist who strongly focuses on the South African livestock and red meat sectors as well as livestock theft. He completed his BSc Agric Animal Science and Agricultural Economics in 2011 at the University of the Free State (UFS), after which he obtained an Hons and MSc in Agricultural Economics, both with distinction, in 2012 and 2015, respectively. He obtained his PhD in 2018 and is currently employed as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Agricultural Economics (UFS). 

He has published 22 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Moreover, 14 papers based on his research have been presented at national and international conferences. He won the Joseph F. Donnermeyer New Scholar Award from the International Society for the Study of Rural Crime in 2020 for his research on the economic impact of stock theft in South Africa. The award is bestowed upon an early-career researcher for a publication about rural criminology. Several of his research papers have been presented at national and international conferences. Both local and international journals have asked him to serve as a reviewer, and he has graduated five master’s students and currently supervises two master’s students and three PhD students. 

In addition to academic writing, he strongly focuses on community engagement and writes approximately 24 popular articles per year. These articles have been published in magazines such as Veeplaas, Stockfarm, Die Rooi Ras, Rooivleis, Oilseed Focus, and Farmbiz. He has also written journal articles for breeds such as Bonsmara, Beefmaster, Boran, Tuli, Angus, and Nguni. He does between 10 and 20 radio interviews and market reports per year for radio stations, including RSG, Rosestad, OFM, Radio Maluti, and Radio Kosmos Namibia. He has been invited to television programs such as Grootplaas, Plaas TV, and the SA Red Meat Producers’ YouTube channel to present his research and discuss current matters. He has served on the Advisory Board for Statistics South Africa to review the 2017 Census of Commercial Agriculture and the 2022 Census Questionnaire.

Dr Mpho Mafa completed his undergraduate and postgraduate studies (BSc.Hon and MSc) specialising in Botany/Molecular Biology at the University of the Free State (UFS) between 2009 and 2015. He enrolled for his PhD at the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, Rhodes University, where Prof Brett Pleatschke supervised him under the auspices of the DST-CSIR National Biocatalysis Initiative between 2015 and 2018. From December 2018 to 2019, Dr Mafa joined the Protein Structure Function Research Unit (PSFRU) within the School of Molecular and Cell Biology at Wits University as a Postdoctoral Fellow. He was hosted by Emeritus Prof Heini Dirr under the auspices of the NRF/DST South African Research Chair Initiative (SARChI) Programme. 

Since 2020, he has held a permanent academic position at the Department of Plant Sciences at the UFS, where he teaches Plant Biochemistry. This position enabled him to start his research group focusing on plant carbohydrate metabolism, CAZymes’ physiological functions during plant-pathogen/pest interaction and the application of CAZymes in the synthesis of value-added products (VAP: for circular economy). He used cutting-edge techniques including but not limited to SEM, SEM with EDS, confocal microscopy, FTIR, XRD, CD and UV/vis spectroscopy to study the mechanism used by CAZmes to loosen, remodel, or reinforce the plant cell wall upon plant-pathogen/pest interactions. Furthermore, Dr Mafa uses the biochemistry, enzymology, and biotechnology approaches to study the effects of the CAZymes on plant carbohydrate metabolism to unravel their physiological role in plant health and survival. He was awarded NRF Thuthuka funding from 2023 to 2025 for a research project that focuses on the application of CAZymes to saccharify Rooibos agricultural residue into VAPs.

Dr Mafa has authored over 17 research articles published in reputable international journals, two book chapters, one patent, and one contracted report. In addition, his research was presented at four international conferences and more than eight local conferences. In 2023, Dr Mafa and Prof Anna-Maria Botha-Oberholster initiated a multidisciplinary research group consisting of Plant Physiologists, Biochemists, Geneticists, Bioinformaticists, and Entomologists from the University of the Free State, University of Johannesburg, Stellenbosch University and ARG-Small Grain. Dr Mafa and Dr Mohase from the UFS successfully hosted a one-day strategic research meeting on 17 July 2023. Lastly, Dr Mafa supervises four PhDs, two MSc, and one BSc honours students. He has strong collaboration locally at UFS, UWC, UP, RU, and Wits.

Dr Jacques Maritz received a Master’s in Physics and a PhD in Astrophysics from the University of the Free State, South Africa (UFS) in 2014 and 2017, respectively. He is a Senior Lecturer in Engineering Sciences at the UFS. His general research interests include physics, astrophysics, energy modelling, energy analytics, energy AI, and power systems. He is an academic advisor for the UFS Interdisciplinary Centre for Digital Futures, particularly the Digital Backbone project.    

Dr Jacques Maritz is the head of the Grid Related Research Group (GRRG), which is a multi-disciplinary research group currently consisting of 3 x three Astrophysicists, two Physicists, one Electrical Engineer, one Mechanical Engineer, one Medical Scientist, two Computer Scientists, three Master’s students and three student researchers.  The group contributes meaningfully to the following areas:

•  Power system dynamics, 
  
•  Carbon analysis, carbon reduction, and carbon management strategies, 
•  Smart grids, microgrids, data monitoring, data acquisition, data analysis, and data storage, 
•  Creation of policies and regulations related to the energy crisis, 
•  Construction of social stochastic models that describe human behaviour within energy ecosystems, 
•  Construction of stochastic models that describe the noise observed in power systems.  

The GRRG has aided the establishment of the UFS smart grid and QwaqQwa microgrid to ensure energy security for the UFS. Dr Maritz’s current research aims to understand and predict the stability of the national power grid by combining Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, and Engineering.  

Dr Kgosi Simphiwe Mocwagae is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning.  He obtained his PhD specializing in Urban and Regional Planning

Research interest
His research interests include planning for basic service provision, particularly for previously disadvantaged communities; land use management, and planning for sustainable urban settlements. Basic service provision is his primary interest hence doing a Ph.D. study title: Exploring the QwaQwa water crisis for effective planning in post-apartheid South Africa. People believe that water provision is an engineering issue and he felt the importance of demonstrating the role planning plays in the provision of water as a basic service.

Land use management and planning often neglect the dynamic element of process human beings take when interacting with land. Informality as an example is one of South Africa's biggest challenges post-apartheid and the informal dwellers that occupy these areas are part of a proactive process of human settlement planning. Through this example, it becomes clear that more research has to be done in terms of collaborative planning that is proactive from the planning side and not reactive to the unfortunate circumstances.

In terms of research he experience, there's still a lot of learning to be done. An opportunity to narrow down his research interests will occur with more experience he is yet to gain in research. His research intent is to be an active agent in the process of correcting the injustices of the past. He intend on supporting Honours, Masters, and Doctoral students with their research projects so that they can contribute to the generation of knowledge in the future.

Contribution to previous research

1. Mocwagae, K. & Cloete, J., 2019. Lephalale: The Energy Hub of the Limpopo Province. In: L. Marais & V. Nel, eds. Space and Planning in Secondary Cities: Reflections from South Africa. Bloemfontein: Sun Press, pp. 67-83.

2. Denoon-Stevens, S. & Mocwagae, K., 2019. The potential of the University of the Free State QwaQwa campus to enable growth of the economy of QwaQwa. Town and Regional Planning, Volume 74, pp. 1-11.

3. Marais, Rooyen, Van, Burger, Cloete, Denoon-Stevens, Lenka, Mocwagae and Jacobus, 2017. The background to the Postmasburg study: How mining towns develop, and the problems they encounter. In: L. Marais, ed. Mining and Communities in the 21st Century: The Postmasburg Case Study. London and New York: Routledge.

4. Mocwagae, K., 2017. Lephalale. In: L. Marais & D. Du Plessis, eds. Spatial Transformation: Are Intermediate Cities Different? Johannesburg: South African Cities Network, pp. 26-27.

 

Dr Nthatisi Innocentia Nyembe is a Lecturer in the Department of Zoology and Entomology at the QwaQwa campus of the UFS. She obtained her PhD in Food hygiene specializing in Animal Husbandry

She is bradly interested in the parasitology based research. Her research focused more on treatment of various parasitic diseases such as the parasitic gastrointestinal nematodes of livestock and protozoan parasites. She has conducted the knowledge in in vitro and in vivo treatment of parasites, as well as determination of possible pathway of the drug in the killing or inhibiting the parasite replication or growth. Furthermore, pathology of treated animals, determination of the LD50 values as well as the toxicity of the drug on healthy and unifected animals. In future, she would like to establish her own in vitro laboratory in the University of the Free State, Qwaqwa campus. She would like to learn more about the diagnostic methods of the parasites in infected animals.

Dr Tlou Raphela is a lecturer at DiMTEC.  She obtained her PhD.
Tlou is a socio-environmental scientist, with an interest in how the social issues interface with the environment holistically. She developed an interest in human-wildlife conflict because she believe human and animals can live together in harmony . Since joining the UFS, and teaching the mental Disaster Mental Health ; Public and mental  health modules, she developed a strong interest in the Psychosocial impacts of disasters and will be focusing her research and creating a niche around that. 

Dr  Elizabeth Rudolph has been employed at the University of the Free State since 2016 as a Lecturer in Geography. Her teaching responsibilities cover the subjects of Geomorphology and skills in Geography for first- and second-year students and honours students. She believes successful teaching caters to different learning styles and needs, whereas a motivated learner strongly influences successful learning. 

Her research interests are in mountainous and cold climate regions – thus her affinity for Glacial and Peri-glacial Geomorphology. She obtained her PhD in 2020, and most of her research has focused on understanding sub-Antarctic islands’ landscape development, integrating aspects of geomorphology, geochronology, geospatial analysis and climate science. She believes South Africa has a unique role in the global view of ‘climate change’ science, particularly through its involvement in the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic through the South African National Antarctic Programme. She intends to continue contributing to this role through her research focus and by building international networks for skills and knowledge transfer to her students. She also advocates for using open data-sharing practices and digital technologies, including virtual field trips, to improve research collaborations and teaching experiences. 

She has personally benefited from having mentors and teachers who are experienced and passionate researchers, so she recognises the value of personal training and quality teaching in securing a future generation of Geographers.

Liezel is currently involved with research on the sub-Antarctic Marion Island and Gough Island in the South Atlantic Ocean and has published several articles in scientific journals and popular science magazines. She is soon stepping into the role of President of the Southern African Association of Geomorphologists, where she hopes to inspire young Geomorphologists and revive interest in field-based, hands-on research.

 

Dr Adriaan van der Walt is a Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography and Geographic Information Systems in the Department of Geography. He is actively engaged in various areas of Geography, including Biometeorology, extreme climatic events and the impacts thereof on human health, animals, and plants. His research has led to the publication of several scientific research papers in internationally recognised, accredited, peer-reviewed journals. He has presented his work at both national and international conferences. He also enjoys contributing to the bodies in his field of interest. He is chairing the Steering Committee of the ACCESS Global Climate Emerging Research Network (GCERN), and he is a member of the International Society of Biometeorology, the Society of South African Geographers Young Professionals group, and an Executive Council member (Deputy Chair) of the Society of South African Geographers to name but a few.

He has co-authored several articles, both in academic and public literature. In 2020, he submitted a co-authored publication in the South African Journal of Science, titled ‘Statistical Classification of South African Seasonal Divisions on the Basis of Daily Temperature Data’, which garnered widespread media coverage with online articles in Business Insider Travel and UFS News, local and national newspaper articles in Rapport, The Citizen, and Cape Argus, radio interviews with SAFM, LotusFM and RSG Monitor, an article in Landbouweekblad magazine, and a podcast interview with The Conversation Africa on extreme temperatures in South Africa. Most recently, he was interviewed by  KykNET Verslag and Fokus on the flooding that occurred in KwaZulu-Natal as well as the Sunday Times and Netwerk24 on the possibility and effects of increasing heat wave and cold wave events in southern and South Africa. He also co-authored articles published in QUEST: Science for South Africa on research in Africa to address the climate change crises, The Conversation Africa: Heat Stress is Rising in southern Africa (climate experts show where and when it’s worst) as well as South Africa’s Cold Weather has Arrived (some tips on how to stay warm and safe).

His research has also been recognised by the Society of South African Geographers’ Centennial Award for Emerging Career Researchers (2020–2021). He was invited to present an online Master Class at the 8th South Asia Heat Health Information Network (SAHHIN) on Heat Stress Mitigation and Adaption Perspectives in South Africa.

Dr Julia Puseletso Mofokeng, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer/Researcher in the Department of Chemistry at the University of the Free State’s Qwaqwa Campus. She graduated with a PhD in Polymer Science in May 2015. She delivers honours degree lectures in Polymer Science and supervises honours, master’s, and doctoral students. Dr Mofokeng is an NRF-rated researcher in the Emerging Researcher (Y2) category (2021–2025), and, in 2016, she received the Best Emerging Researcher award from the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences (Qwaqwa Campus). 

Research and Supervision
Dr Mofokeng’s research involves the preparation, synthesis, and characterisation of completely biodegradable polymers, their blends, and composites/nanocomposites, for possible applications in packaging (short shelf-life/disposable materials), water purification, medical devices, and automotive interior industries. The research is aimed at managing the plastic waste to combat the environment and atmospheric pollution and to save energy. To achieve these aims, Dr Mofokeng and her small research group are preparing completely biodegradable polymer blends, improving their morphology, thermal, thermo-mechanical, mechanical, and flame retardancy properties, using natural fibres and inorganic/organic fillers, to tailor materials for application as mentioned above. She has since published 14 articles in specialised international peer-reviewed journals, and her research has been presented in 17 local and international research conferences. She has graduated seven honours and six master’s research students, and she is currently supervising one honours, one master’s, and three doctoral research students in Polymer Science. Dr Mofokeng was nominated for and joined the UFS Future Professoriate Mentoring Programme for 2023–2024 to advance her career.

Engaged Scholarship
Serving on the university’s professional boards, Dr Mofokeng: (1) is currently an academic-sector representative for the UFS Qwaqwa Campus on the UFS Institutional Multi-Stakeholder Group; (2) has been the representative of the Natural and Agricultural Sciences Faculty on the UFS (Qwaqwa Campus) Research Management and Funding Committee (UFS-QCRMFC) since 2020, (3) has served as a panellist in the evaluation of the proposals for the UFS’s annual grants awards for interdisciplinary research projects (2021 and 2023), and (4) has been an invited reviewer for the Journal of Applied Polymer Science since 2020. Dr Mofokeng was a chief organiser of the UFS Qwaqwa Campus Research Management and Funding Committee’s (UFS-QCRMFC) 2022 Conference that was held at the Harrismith Inn, and she recently published a review article with her first PhD student (Mr Lesia Mokoena).