The story behind every achievement

An introduction to the NSTF-South32 Awards 2025/2026 supplement

Tracy Lee Stark

29 JUL 2026, 14:53

104 min read

In a village in the Lowveld, a researcher has spent thirty years following the same families, year after year, to understand how people age in rural South Africa. In a laboratory at the University of Johannesburg, a team has been building the layers of a battery one atom at a time. At nearly eighty years old, a scientist who has no institutional funding left is still driving across Cape Town to give talks to anyone who will listen, because he made himself a promise that he would do this until the day he dies. None of these people are famous. All of them should be.

The NSTF-South32 Awards exist to do something simple and something enormous at the same time: to notice excellent work and to say so, loudly and publicly, on a stage built for exactly that purpose. This year, almost one hundred finalists competed for twenty places, the same intensity as any cup final, minus the cameras that usually come with such a championship. Every one of the finalists arrived at this point through years, sometimes decades, of work that most South Africans will never hear about unless someone takes the trouble to tell it. That is what this supplement, and the Awards themselves, are for.

Why does this matter so much? Because obscurity has real, measurable consequences, not just for the scientists themselves but for the country.

"A good example is Ebola," says Jansie Niehaus, NSTF Executive Director. "When a serious infectious disease is perceived by those with funding to be unimportant, its research is not prioritised, and the world is caught unprepared by its spread, as happened at the start of the COVID pandemic too."

The same logic runs the other way. Visibility through awards leads to funding and business opportunities, and it shapes what young people believe they can imagine themselves doing in future.

There is also a simpler, more personal stake in getting this right.

"We at the NSTF believe that our recognition contributes to the public's relationship with science, and the pride people can have in our country," Niehaus says. "But also, when hard-working, innovative scientists and professionals don't feel acknowledged, they leave South Africa and go where they are recognised. Hopefully, we are contributing to keeping our top science celebrities here."

An NSTF Award means something different depending on where a winner stands in their career, and that range is part of what makes the Awards matter. For some of the veteran researchers and leaders honoured this year, the Award is the cherry on top of a career already built, a public and well-earned confirmation of decades of dedication. A number of past winners have later gone on to receive National Orders from the President himself. Twenty of them now hold that highest honour, having been recognised by the NSTF long before the country recognised them at the very top.

For others, younger and still building their careers, an Award is a beginning rather than an ending, a stepping stone that some return to collect again in later years with new achievements behind them. And for the small companies, the NGOs and the teams who never expected to be seen at all, winning can be something close to disorientating. Adjudicators often see the worth of the work, and its potential, before the people doing it have fully recognised it themselves. Their gratitude tells its own story: sometimes an Award is a hand extended, a small push to help someone find the momentum they already deserved.

Recognition like this ripples outward in ways that go well beyond the individual being celebrated. Visibility for demographic groups of scientists and professionals who have historically been overlooked, Black South Africans and women in particular, matters for exactly the same reason obscurity is dangerous: young people watching get to see something that matters more than any trophy, proof that this is a life they too could choose, and what is recognised becomes what is valued.

That shift is already under way. The proportion of individual NSTF Award winners from Black population groups now stands at 45.6 percent, steadily built over 27 years. The proportion of women has grown to 38 percent. The effect shows up in real choices. The top maths and science matrics of the NSTF Brilliants Programme have increasingly opted for STEM-related fields of study over the years, whereas previously many would have chosen accounting instead. The uptake of medical fields of study has also improved markedly among top students since the pandemic made the importance of medicine impossible to miss, despite the ongoing and serious challenges in South Africa's medical sector.

This is also why the breadth of categories in these Awards matters as much as the winners within them. Alongside the achievements that make headlines, sit categories built around water, the green economy, science diplomacy, agriculture, the curation of research data and, this year for the first time, research software. These fields carry entire scientific ecosystems on their backs, quietly and rarely with much fanfare. Nobody usually photographs the person who designed the data system that made a national biodiversity assessment possible, or the engineer who has kept a piece of research software alive for years so that thousands of astronomers worldwide could rely on it. These Awards make sure that work is seen too and, in doing so, tell young South Africans deciding on a future that there is no single template for a life in science. There are as many paths as there are problems worth solving.

"So here is what I would ask, plainly, of everyone reading this," says Niehaus. "To my fellow South Africans, notice the scientists we have. Notice, too, the many matric students getting ninety percent and above in maths and science in every single province, not only the handful celebrated each January. There are far more of them than we ever hear about.

"To government, do not cut research budgets. This is not a luxury line item. It is the thing that lets us survive and compete as a country in the years ahead, and stopping and restarting funding costs far more than sustaining it ever would.

"To the media, hire and back good science writers who can translate this work for the public, because that translation is part of building a country that trusts evidence over fear.

"To the private sector, thank you for what you already invest, and please keep joining hands with government and with the NSTF to take this further."

Every story in the pages that follow carries the same undercurrent. Behind each achievement is a person, and very often that person has been excelling despite circumstances that would have stopped most people: thin funding, long distances to travel, a community where nobody who looked like them had done this work before, years of being told, in ways large and small, that this was not where they belonged. They kept going anyway, and this year the NSTF-South32 Awards are here to say, clearly and on the record, that the work was seen, that it mattered, and that South Africa is proud of what has been built.

To every young person reading this and wondering whether a future in science, engineering, technology or innovation is really open to them: it is. The scientists in this supplement are the proof. Step up. The work is worth it, and so are you.

Winners: NSTF-South32 Awards 2025/2026

Lifetime Award
Prof Rachel Jewkes
Over three decades, she built the world's most influential body of research on gender-based violence, shaping global policy, prevention programmes and health systems across more than 13 countries.

TW Kambule-NSTF Researcher Award (joint winners) | Sponsor: proSET (Professionals in science, engineering and technology)
Prof Tjaart Krüger
He built Africa's first single-molecule spectroscopy platform to decode nature's quantum blueprint for harvesting sunlight, with applications in clean energy and food security.

Prof Musa Manzi
He became the first Black South African to earn a PhD in Geophysics and has since built Africa's leading seismic research centre, training a generation of Black South African scientists while delivering a R200-million national survey of the Karoo Basin.

TW Kambule-NSTF Emerging Researcher Award (joint winners) | Sponsor: South African Young Academy of Science (SAYAS)
Dr Edith Phalane
She uses big data analytics and machine learning to close persistent gaps in HIV data for marginalised populations, building the Boloka repository and supervising a growing cohort of Black African women researchers.

Prof Topside Mathonsi
He develops artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) systems that protect South Africa's critical infrastructure, from water networks to underground cables, with detection accuracies exceeding 95%.

Management Award
Prof Marcia Mkansi
She has produced five copyright-protected software innovations spanning healthcare, e-grocery and research methodology, generating two of UNISA's first commercial cases in 150 years while helping colleagues secure R76 million in competitive grants.

Engineering Research Capacity Development Award
Prof Sudesh Sivarasu
He has trained 99 researchers, 56% of them women and 50% Black African, through Africa's first Medical Device Design curriculum, generating 30 granted patents and five spin-out companies valued above R235 million.

NSTF-Water Research Commission (WRC) Award | Sponsor: WRC
Prof Patricia Forbes
She develops sensitive, affordable analytical tools for detecting trace organic pollutants in South African water, including a patented graphene wool sorbent now protected by a granted Chinese patent.

NSTF-SAMRC Clinician-Scientist Award | Sponsor: South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC)
Prof Llewellyn Padayachy
He is developing a suite of non-invasive, eye-based diagnostic tools to detect raised intracranial pressure in brain tumour patients earlier, spinning off a Norwegian company and attracting collaborators from Oxford to Harvard

NSTF-TIA Green Economy Award | Sponsor: Technology Innovation Agency (TIA)
Prof Fortune Ganda
His Green Finance-Environment Nexus framework uses advanced econometrics to translate abstract ESG goals into measurable financial metrics, directly informing SA’s Carbon Tax and delivering green economy training to taxi operators and municipal finance staff.

Science Diplomacy for Africa Award | Sponsor: Science Diplomacy Capital for Africa (SDCfA)
Prof Malik Maaza
He has spent nearly three decades building 13 continental platforms for nanoscience research, training and policy, supporting scientists from conflict zones and shaping the African Union's science strategy.

NSTF-Agricultural Research Council (ARC) Award | Sponsor: ARC Reel Life Food Security Programme, Reel Life NPC

This non-profit company (NPC) led by Ms Claire Blanckenburg patented seed-tape system and garden-in-a-box programme has reached 70,500 households and 3,230 schools across SA, delivering up to 80% water savings and transforming first-time growers into agripreneurs.

Research Software Award | Sponsor: South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR)
Cube Analysis and Rendering Tool for Astronomy (CARTA)
CARTA is the world's leading visual analytics platform for radio astronomy, used by over 6,000 astronomers across MeerKAT, ALMA, VLA and SKA workflows, with its architectural leadership based at SA's IDIA.

NSTF-SADiLaR Research Software Award: Human Language Technologies (HLT) | Sponsor: SADiLaR
TextAugment
Team TextAugment led by Prof Vukosi Marivate artificially expands small text datasets to enable accurate AI language models for under-resourced African languages including isiZulu, Sesotho and Xitsonga, and has been cited in research spanning Swahili, Arabic and Azerbaijani.

Data for Research Award
National Biodiversity Assessment 2025 Core Data Team
This 21-member team led by Prof Andrew Skowno coordinated 490 experts across 110 institutions to produce SA's most comprehensive biodiversity assessment, delivered as a living online platform already embedded in national environmental policy.

Innovation Award: Corporate Organisation | Sponsor: National Intellectual Property Management Office (NIPMO)
JENano Research Group
This team led by Prof Tien Chien Jen established SA's first Atomic Layer Deposition research centre, developing membraneless electrolysers, advanced battery materials and hydrogen storage technologies with industry partners Hydrox Holdings and Mitochondria.

Innovation Award: Small, medium and micro enterprise (SMME) | Sponsor: NIPMO AIrSynQ Systems
This company led by Prof Bruce Mellado commercialises an AI-powered air quality intelligence platform that senses, interprets, predicts and acts on environmental data in real time.

Communication Award
Prof Mike Bruton
Approaching 80, he gave 73 science talks to 54 organisations in 2025 alone, led the Darwin 2025 project that placed a permanent bronze bust of Darwin on Simon's Town Jetty, and has published 12 popular science books since 2015.

Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) Award
Advancing Knowledge NPC
Since 2019, this non-profit led by Prof Shaheed Hartley has built 67 fully equipped Science Teaching and Learning Centres in under-resourced schools across the Western Cape and Eastern Cape, training over 1,000 educators through SACE-accredited programmes.

Special Annual Theme Award: Healthy Ageing
Team Prof Kathleen Kahn and Prof Stephen Tollman
These two professors co-lead the SAMRC/Wits-Agincourt Unit at Wits University, a 30-year rural population platform covering 120,000 people whose longitudinal evidence on ageing, multimorbidity and cognitive decline is shaping health policy from Bushbuckridge to the World Health Organization.

Lifetime Award

There is a particular kind of courage required to spend more than three decades working at the intersection of violence, gender and public health. It requires the ability to confront uncomfortable truths, follow evidence into areas that challenge powerful interests, and continue the work despite the scale of the problem. Prof Rachel Jewkes, Executive Scientist at the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) and Honorary Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) School of Public Health, has dedicated her career to doing exactly that.

Her career began with a group of young women whose stories changed the direction of her work. While conducting research on sexual and reproductive health in Cape Town in the early 1990s, she encountered young women whose pregnancies were linked to rape and abuse. It was then that she recognised violence was not a private matter, but a critical missing piece in understanding sexual and reproductive health, and a major public health crisis that had largely remained invisible.

Working in public health in South Africa (SA) during the 1990s, Jewkes encountered the unreported scale of violence against women and quickly realised that no meaningful policy response could exist without a strong evidence base. She set out to build one. More than three decades later, her 345 peer-reviewed journal articles, cited nearly 60,000 times, with an h-index of 107, represent one of the most influential bodies of research on gender-based violence in global public health.

From the SAMRC’s Gender and Health Research Unit, which she led for more than two decades, Jewkes and her team documented the prevalence, causes and consequences of GBV and femicide in SA. Their research examined GBV’s role in the HIV epidemic, evaluated responses across the health, police and justice sectors, and developed prevention interventions now used across Africa, Asia and beyond.

Her Stepping Stones programme, a gender-transformative HIV and GBV prevention intervention designed for rural Eastern Cape communities, was the subject of a landmark cluster randomised controlled trial. It was the first study to show that GBV perpetration by men could be reduced through a participatory, community-based intervention. Its findings influenced prevention programmes internationally.

Her What Works to Prevent Violence Against Women and Girls? Global Programme, which she led from 2013 to 2020, brought together research across 13 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The programme completed 17 studies and developed seven new GBV prevention interventions. It showed that 40% of evaluated interventions could reduce GBV, identified nine effective intervention approaches, and outlined 10 key features needed for successful design and implementation. This evidence has shaped global investment in violence prevention.

The influence of her research extends into policy and funding decisions worldwide. The European Union’s (EU’s) Spotlight Initiative on GBV prevention and the United Kingdom (UK) Government’s What Works 2 programme both built on evidence developed through this global research effort. The Global Fund’s investment in HIV and gender inequality interventions has also been informed by research demonstrating the relationship between GBV and HIV risk among women. Her work has been cited in more than 1,580 policy documents worldwide.

Jewkes has been NRF A-rated three times, most recently receiving an A1 rating in 2016 and again in 2022, recognising her standing among South Africa’s leading scientists. She is a founder member of the Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI), now a global network of more than 13,000 researchers and practitioners, and served as its Secretary for 13 years while it was hosted at the SAMRC. She was lead technical advisor to the United Nations (UN) Multi-country Study on Men and Violence in Asia and the Pacific from 2008 to 2013 and has served as a technical advisor to the World Health Organisation (WHO) on multiple occasions.

The impact of her research can be seen across communities, policy and health systems. Her statistics provided the foundation for the 1 in 9 Campaign, launched in 2006 to support rape survivor Fezeka Khuzwayo. Her team developed the national curriculum for post-rape care, the only one approved under the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act of 2007. Her research into the rape of children by school teachers contributed to the establishment of the South African Council of Educators (SACE). Her work has informed national GBV policy documents, including the National Strategic Plan on GBV and Femicide, and has been regularly presented to Parliamentary Committees.

Her current flagship project, Fediša Modikologo, meaning “breaking the cycle” in Sesotho, is a Wellcome Trust-funded prospective cohort study running until 2031. The study tracks the impact of severe intimate partner violence (IPV) on women’s health and on the lives of their children.

The research includes three cohorts: 9,691 women recruited from four sites across Limpopo, Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape who have recently experienced severe IPV; a sub-cohort followed every six months over several years; and the children of those women. In the past 18 months alone, the study has provided counselling and support to more than 9,500 women.

Jewkes is also a co-investigator on the fifth national femicide study, the latest stage in a surveillance programme she established in 1999, which was the first of its kind globally.

Beyond her research achievements, Jewkes has invested deeply in developing the next generation of scientists. Associates who joined her team as junior researchers in the 1990s have gone on to become professors and unit directors, carrying forward the field she helped build.

The NSTF-South32 Lifetime Award recognises a career defined by more than three decades of research, advocacy and impact in advancing understanding of violence against women and building a safer, more just society.

Special Annual Theme Award: Healthy Ageing

In 1990, two young researchers joined University of Witwatersrand's (Wits) Health Systems Development Unit and drove to a cluster of villages in north-eastern South Africa (SA) called Agincourt. They were responding to a gap they could not look past: rural communities, shaped by decades of apartheid-era neglect, had almost no population-based health data. Without that data, health planning was essentially guesswork. With it, evidence for policy could be built from the ground up.

More than 30 years later, what began as an act of principled scientific determination has become one of the world's most respected long-term population health studies. The SAMRC/Wits Rural Public Health and Health Transitions Research Unit, known as the Agincourt Unit, now follows some 120,000 people in 22,000 households across more than 30 neighbouring villages. It is the only South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) unit devoted entirely to rural health and development.

The two scientists who built it, Professors Kathleen Kahn and Stephen Tollman, have spent their careers working in close partnership, each bringing distinct scientific leadership to a shared vision.

Prof Kathleen Kahn

Kathy Kahn traces her professional direction to a single formative experience. As a second-year medical student, she participated in an evaluation of voluntary rural women's groups established to prevent trachoma. The encounter with the lived realities of rural South Africans, and the health inequalities embedded in those realities, set a course from which she has never deviated.

"I have never deviated from undertaking work in the pursuit of greater equity for our country and continent's most disadvantaged and marginalised communities," she says.

At the Agincourt Unit, which she co-established with Tollman and where she serves as Principal Scientist, Kahn's most influential early contribution was establishing and leading the use of verbal autopsy as a systematic way of determining causes of death in places where official death records were limited. In communities where most deaths happen at home rather than in hospitals, this is not simply a research method. It is an essential public health tool. The World Health Organisation (WHO) recognised the importance of this work by designating Kahn as Director of its Collaborating Centre for Verbal Autopsy in SA.

Among the most important discoveries was the first evidence that stroke was a leading cause of death among middle-aged and older people in rural SA, occurring just as often as HIV/AIDS among women over 50. The finding changed how researchers and policymakers understood rural health. Communities were carrying a heavy burden of chronic diseases alongside infectious diseases. Integrated healthcare was needed, rather than separate programmes for different illnesses. The research helped motivate the Department of Health (NDoH) to partner with the SAMRC/Wits Agincourt Unit in a national pilot of integrated care.

Kahn also leads the Unit's adolescent physical and mental health research. Her work on interventions for adolescent depression aims to improve not only mental health outcomes but educational attainment, which Agincourt research has shown is strongly linked to better cognitive health later in life. She co-leads a trial to improve body mass index in underweight and overweight adolescent girls, addressing early-life malnutrition that, if left unchecked, becomes a major driver of Type 2 diabetes in adulthood. More recently, she has turned her attention to HIV prevention in older adults. Her team documented high levels of sexual risk behaviour among people over 40, a population with no targeted prevention programmes. A randomised trial of home-based HIV self-testing found the approach to be safe, preferred by participants, and associated with lower depression scores.

"Healthy ageing begins at early life stages," she says. "Health is shaped over time, from pre-conception through pregnancy, childhood and adolescence, to older ages."

The SAMRC/Wits Agincourt Unit employs around 250 people from the study communities each year, many of whom are the sole income earners in their families. Graduate students Kahn supervised are now supervising students of their own. The knowledge generated in Agincourt has also contributed to the Global Burden of Disease 2023 study, coordinated by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

Prof Stephen Tollman

Steve Tollman's path to Agincourt also began in medical school, and with an encounter with rural apartheid that became defining. Seeing how policy and practice disregarded the rights of rural citizens, he committed himself to work that valued every life and generated evidence capable of changing the conditions shaping that life.

"Passion has several drivers and sources," he says. "Tackling critical issues and devising solutions that make a difference, especially among middle-aged and older persons who carry tremendous responsibility for children and youth, household and societal development."

As Director and Research Professor at the SAMRC/Wits Agincourt Unit, Tollman's career has been built around one central idea: understanding health and ageing in rural SA requires following the same people and communities over many years.

The Agincourt Health and Socio-Demographic Surveillance System, which he co-established with Kahn, does exactly that. One of its most important studies is HAALSA, Health and Ageing in Africa: Longitudinal Studies in SA, which follows around 5,500 people aged 40 and older over time. Running for more than 12 years, it has become one of Africa's richest sources of information on how HIV, cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, cognitive decline and dementia interact as people age.

The breakthrough Tollman remembers most clearly came as the Unit worked to establish what people were dying from. The discovery that rural women were just as likely to die of stroke as of HIV/AIDS transformed the Unit's scientific agenda. It paved the way for pioneering work on multiple chronic illnesses, healthy ageing and health systems designed to respond to both.

The platform has since produced evidence that has shaped national policy. Studies documenting dangerously high rates of hypertension contributed to SA's regulations on the salt content of certain foods, while Agincourt data later showed sustained improvements in sodium intake and blood pressure, particularly among women. An evaluation of the sugar-sweetened beverage tax is now underway. The HAALSA study has also provided real-world evidence of how social grants paid to older people improve the health and wellbeing of entire households.

Technology has played an equally important role in Tollman's work. The Unit introduced tablet-based cognitive testing to reduce educational and cultural bias in assessing older participants with limited schooling. It developed a system linking research participants with clinic and hospital records, providing a model for future electronic health records in rural public healthcare. It also brought the first portable MRI scanner used in rural Africa to Agincourt, allowing researchers to study brain health and cognitive ageing in communities that had never before had access to this technology. The Unit's work updating the WHO’s verbal autopsy tools to include COVID-19 is now being evaluated by the WHO and is expected to be widely adopted internationally.

Tollman also played a central role in establishing the South African Population Research Infrastructure Network (SAPRIN), which links population research sites across rural and urban SA. The network will support a national study on healthy ageing in 2026 and 2027, with the Agincourt data collected over three decades providing an important benchmark for the project.

"I am certain that building the evidence to understand and respond to healthy ageing along the life course in the demanding, rapidly changing context of rural SA can make a profound contribution," he says. "Within SA, on the continent, and across global societies."

Together

The partnership between Kahn and Tollman is itself a scientific achievement. Reflecting on the Unit's 25th and later 30th anniversaries, celebrated with staff and alumni at Oxford, Harvard and Wits, they sought to capture not only the scientific and policy advances, but also accounts of the teams they had built, the generations of scientists they had trained, and the long-term relationships with communities without which none of the science would have been possible.

"In Agincourt, no achievement belongs to one person alone," Kahn says.

"The leadership partnership with Kathleen Kahn is a rare privilege," Tollman says.

The world now faces an ageing challenge that is as acute in rural SA as it is anywhere else. For more than 30 years, in a cluster of villages in the Lowveld, two scientists quietly built the evidence needed to understand it.

TW Kambule-NSTF Researcher Award

Prof Tjaart Krüger describes his work in simple terms. “Colloquially and very broadly,” he says, “I’m shooting plants with lasers.” Prof Krüger in the Department of Physics at the University of Pretoria (UP) then explains the science behind the phrase: developing and assembling ultra-sensitive single-molecule spectroscopy systems to study how natural systems convert sunlight into usable energy, and how those principles may inform future energy technologies.

His curiosity began early, rooted in a fascination with how the natural world can be described through physical laws and mathematical relationships. Over time, this developed into a focus on biophysics, where biological systems are studied through the principles of physics.

“Mixing the complex beauty of biology with the rigour of physics still amazes me every day,” he says.

A green leaf is one of nature’s most efficient energy systems. Through photosynthesis, plants capture sunlight and convert it into chemical energy using water and carbon dioxide. These systems continuously adapt to changing light conditions, balancing efficient energy capture with protection against damage.

Krüger’s work focuses on understanding the molecular processes that make this possible, particularly how energy is transferred and regulated within photosynthetic complexes. This knowledge is also relevant to the development of artificial photosynthesis and organic solar energy systems.

When he joined UP in 2013, he began developing the laboratory infrastructure needed for this research. From 2014 onwards, with support from the National Research Foundation (NRF) National Equipment Programme, he helped establish a single-molecule spectroscopy (SMS) facility at the university.

The system was built using more than 100 optical and electronic components and allows researchers to study the behaviour of individual light-harvesting molecular complexes with very high temporal resolution. Because suitable commercial software was not available, custom control and analysis tools were developed within the laboratory. The facility was formally established in 2017 and continues to support ongoing research and development.

For Krüger, the project demonstrates that advanced experimental science can be developed locally through careful design and collaboration, even within constrained research environments.

His research has contributed to new understanding of how photosynthetic systems function at the molecular level. One area of focus is the role of molecular disorder in energy transfer processes. Rather than being purely detrimental, his work and that of collaborators suggests that structural variation may in some cases play a functional role in biological energy systems.

Another area of research examines how photosynthetic complexes switch between light-harvesting and photoprotective states, a process that remains an active topic of study in the field.

These findings have been published in more than 40 peer-reviewed journal articles and presented at international conferences. Krüger holds an NRF B2 rating.

He has also extended this research direction into agricultural applications through a United Kingdom (UK)-African collaboration focused on low-cost imaging systems for monitoring plant health. Using accessible platforms such as Raspberry Pi and Arduino components, prototype multispectral cameras have been developed at significantly lower cost than commercial systems.

This work is aimed at supporting crop monitoring and contributing to food security research. It is being developed in collaboration with UP’s Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute (FABI), supported by a 2025 UK research and innovation fellowship focused on frugal innovation for societal challenges in Africa.

Training and capacity development form a central part of his work. Krüger runs annual short courses on photosynthesis and solar energy, having trained more than 75 postgraduate students from multiple disciplines. He contributes to broader African scientific collaboration through the African Strategy for Fundamental and Applied Physics (ASFAP), where he leads a biophysics focus group.

He has supervised a range of postgraduate research students at honours, masters and doctoral level, contributing to the development of early-career researchers in biophysics and related fields.

His more recent work includes participation in quantum science and technology initiatives at UP, where research is exploring the intersection between quantum phenomena and biological light-harvesting systems. In collaboration with international partners, early-stage studies are investigating bio-inspired approaches to organic photovoltaics.

The leaf continues to serve as a model for understanding complex energy systems. Krüger’s work remains focused on uncovering how these natural processes function, one molecule at a time.

Reading the earth from the inside out

Prof Musa Manzi has transformed South African geophysics – one innovation, one student and one community at a time

When Prof Musa Manzi was a third-year student at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), his mother and sister died within a day of each other. In the weeks that followed, he attempted several times to end his own life. He brought his two young nieces – aged seven and five – to Johannesburg because there was no one to look after them. For months, he attended university lectures with them and slept at Park Station and in university libraries until a place in residence became available. Fellow students and church members brought food parcels. A classmate, Celeste Johnson, took him home for a meal; her parents, Ed and Rose Thomas, eventually opened their home to all three of them and helped fund his education.

Today, Manzi is the Founding Director of the Wits Seismic Research Centre – widely regarded as the best geophysical research and training hub in Africa – and the only academic leading expert on the continent in the field of reflection seismology. He tells that story not for sympathy, but because he believes it explains everything about how he runs his research centre: as a place of trust, creativity and deliberate investment in people who need someone to open a door for them.

There is gold beneath the Karoo. There is platinum beneath the Bushveld. There are fault lines beneath Johannesburg. And beneath all of it, there is a story that the earth tells in seismic waves – if only you have the tools to listen. Manzi's career has been dedicated to building those tools and teaching South Africa (SA) how to use them.

His research develops novel, cost-effective and environmentally friendly seismic techniques that allow scientists and engineers to scan the earth's subsurface without drilling a single hole. Working with fibre-optic telecommunications cables, wireless seismic sensors and purpose-built land streamers, his team has advanced Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) technology for use on the surface, inside boreholes and in mine tunnels – transforming how SA explores for gold, platinum, manganese and rare earth elements, while also helping detect sinkholes, monitor methane explosions in mines and understand earthquake risk beneath cities. In 2013, he became the first Black South African to earn a PhD in Geophysics. His work received the 2012 Best Paper Award from the Society of Exploration Geophysicists and, in 2016, he became the first recipient of the International Award for Research Excellence in Earth and Ocean Sciences from the American Geophysical Union.

The flagship of his current work is the Karoo GeoScan Project – a R200-million government initiative awarded in 2024 by the Petroleum Agency of SA, in which his Centre is conducting the largest seismic surveys ever undertaken in Africa across the Western Cape, Northern Cape and Eastern Cape. The project maps the subsurface geology of the Karoo Basin for natural resource exploration, geohazard analysis and geo-environmental investigation, while also generating important data on groundwater. More than 50 community members were employed and trained as part of the project, with postgraduate students and early-career researchers gaining hands-on experience in large-scale data acquisition alongside them.

The transformation within the Wits Seismic Research Centre since its establishment in 2015 is perhaps the most remarkable number of all. It started with two MSc students. Today it hosts approximately 40 researchers – 8 postdoctoral fellows (six of them Black South Africans) and 15 PhD and 18 MSc postgraduate students, virtually all Black South Africans. Manzi has supervised more than 15 Black South African PhDs in geophysics – more than anyone else in the country's history. Three of his former doctoral students, Drs Ngcobo, Rapetsoa and Mutshafa, have been appointed as academics at the Wits School of Geosciences. The Centre's commercial research activities have generated more than R300 million in the past five years, sustaining instruments, postdoctoral salaries and the research pipeline.

Beyond the university, Manzi co-founded the Wits Mathematics Competition in 2018, runs Saturday mathematics classes through the Dr Musa Manzi Foundation across more than 20 centres in Southern Africa, and founded the Gentle Giants Orphanage in KwaZulu-Natal – home to approximately 120 children – which he uses to encourage young people to pursue science careers. His Foundation collaborates with the Wits Seismic Research Centre to use geophysics to locate groundwater boreholes for rural communities in KwaZulu-Natal.

He explains his philosophy plainly: the things you do for yourself are gone when you are gone. The things you do for others remain as your legacy. It is a philosophy forged in the hardest possible circumstances – and it has produced, in less than fifteen years, a research centre, a generation of scientists and a community foundation that will outlast any single discovery.

Prof Manzi received the TW Kambule-NSTF Emerging Researcher Award in 2018, and his unit, the School of Geosciences at Wits, walked away with the trophy for the Data for Research Award in 2021.

Dr Edith Phalane describes herself as a product of intentional mentorship, and she is committed to passing that support on. As Senior Researcher and Manager of the SAMRC/UJ Pan African Centre for Epidemics Research (PACER) at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), she says one of the most meaningful moments in her career came in April 2026, when seven PhD students she had co-supervised graduated.

“Having been a student myself, it was deeply meaningful to stand on the other side as a supervisor and mentor,” she says. “It affirmed for me that I am contributing to something larger than myself.”

That perspective shapes both her leadership and her research. South Africa has the largest antiretroviral treatment programme in the world, but significant gaps remain in HIV data, particularly among marginalised and hard-to-reach populations. Factors such as stigma, discrimination and structural inequality make these populations difficult to study and serve, resulting in incomplete or fragmented datasets. This creates challenges for targeting interventions and allocating resources effectively. Phalane describes this as the data gap in the HIV response.

Her work focuses on addressing this gap through the development of integrated data systems and advanced analytical methods. As co-investigator and project manager of the Boloka Project, funded by the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) Research Capacity Development Programme since 2022, she has helped build a data repository that consolidates HIV and key population datasets from multiple partners, including the Aurum Institute, the Perinatal Health Research Unit, ANOVA, Agape, the National Department of Health (NDoH) and the Ghana AIDS Commission.

The system follows a structured process of stakeholder engagement, dataset identification, quality control, secure cloud-based storage through the Data Intensive Research Initiative of South Africa (DIRISA) infrastructure, and controlled access for approved researchers. The aim is to improve the usability of existing data for research and programme planning.

Boloka is one of several research programmes she contributes to at PACER. As co-investigator on the Lokishang project, she works on the analysis of survey and routine programme data to support adaptive implementation of HIV services for female sex workers and adolescent girls. As Principal Investigator of a women’s health and wellbeing project, she leads research on multimorbidity, sexual and reproductive health, and gender inequality. She has also contributed to COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness studies.

Her academic output reflects sustained research activity. Together with postgraduate students, Phalane has co-authored 42 peer-reviewed journal articles and 20 conference proceedings, and presented at more than 70 national and international conferences.

Her supervision record includes seven completed PhDs and 20 master’s graduates, with additional doctoral and master’s students currently in progress. Many of her students are Black African women. Under her mentorship, students have collectively received more than 40 awards, fellowships and recognitions from organisations including the SAMRC, Black Women in Science (BWIS), the South African Women in Science Awards (SAWISA) and the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings. More than 20 scholarships have been secured to support postgraduate study. She has also co-mentored international interns through the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health as part of the Boloka project.

Phalane holds an NRF Y2 rating, awarded in 2025. She received the Best Oral Presentation award at the 7th National Big Data Health Sciences Conference in the United States in 2026 for her work applying machine learning to antiretroviral treatment patterns. She serves on technical working groups for the South African National AIDS Council (SANAC) and the NDoH, contributing to HIV estimates and key populations policy.

She is also active in scientific leadership and mentorship networks, including the Organisation for Women in Science in Developing Countries (South African Chapter) and BWIS. For more than eight years, she has mentored and judged at the Eskom Expo for Young Scientists, guiding learners through research development from early concept to presentation at regional and international levels.

She is clear about the current challenges facing HIV research and response systems. Reductions in donor funding risk undermining long-standing gains in HIV prevention and treatment.

“This moment presents an opportunity to reimagine and strengthen HIV responses in ways that are more locally driven, data-informed and impactful,” she says.

Through the Boloka Project, Phalane and her collaborators are also planning a big data and health sciences conference in Africa in 2026, aimed at strengthening interdisciplinary collaboration in data science and public health across the continent.

In public health, she notes, collaboration across disciplines is essential to addressing complex health challenges.

Prof Topside Mathonsi grew up in an environment where access to reliable infrastructure and advanced technology could not be taken for granted. He describes this background not as a limitation, but as a motivation for his research direction.

“That background has shaped my belief that research must not only produce papers,” he says. “It must also produce solutions that can improve lives.”

As Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Information Technology at Tshwane University of Technology (TUT), Mathonsi leads a research programme focused on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and Internet of Things (IoT) systems applied to real-world infrastructure challenges.

His work centres on intelligent monitoring systems designed to support critical infrastructure in areas such as municipal services, agriculture and telecommunications. These include challenges such as water loss in ageing distribution networks, limited real-time tracking in livestock systems, infrastructure security risks, and monitoring limitations in remote or underground environments.

His research portfolio includes several applied projects. One focuses on water leak detection and localisation in municipal systems using machine learning models integrated with hydraulic network simulations. Another explores IoT-based livestock tracking systems using long-range communication technologies designed for rural and smallholder farming contexts. A further project investigates AI-assisted surveillance systems for agricultural environments, combining computer vision techniques for anomaly detection. He is also involved in research on underground sensing systems aimed at supporting infrastructure monitoring and theft prevention in telecommunications networks.

“What drives me is the opportunity to develop technologies that are scientifically robust, locally relevant and socially meaningful,” he says.

The research is strongly applied and draws on a range of simulation and modelling environments. These include hydraulic modelling tools for water systems, network simulation platforms for IoT architecture testing, and electromagnetic simulation tools for antenna design and signal optimisation. Much of the work is developed within TUT laboratories, with collaboration from industry partners such as Eskom and SENTECH, as well as institutional research centres within the university.

His publication record includes more than 30 accredited journal articles, over 60 conference papers and several book chapters. He holds an H-index of 11.

He has supervised a number of postgraduate students at master’s and doctoral level, with many of his master’s graduates completing with distinction. He currently supervises additional master’s and PhD students and has also mentored postdoctoral researchers. His academic leadership role has developed alongside his research output, with his appointment as Head of Department in 2024 reflecting both responsibilities.

Beyond his university role, Mathonsi has contributed to skills development and outreach initiatives, including cybersecurity awareness programmes for high school learners and participation in regional and international conferences and research collaborations. He has also contributed to capacity-building initiatives within African higher education partnerships focused on digital skills and cybersecurity.

He has received multiple internal university recognitions for research and emerging scholarship over several years, reflecting sustained performance across teaching, supervision and research.

His advice to emerging researchers reflects his approach to problem-solving in technology fields: “Start with a problem that matters. Ask who benefits, and how the work can improve systems, communities or industries.”

At an early stage in his academic leadership career, Mathonsi continues to build research systems focused on applied AI and infrastructure resilience, alongside a growing cohort of postgraduate researchers working in these areas.

Management Award

Prof Marcia Mkansi describes her research approach as purpose-driven. “It’s more rewarding to pursue research with purpose,” she says. “It’s like a scientific revival.”

That approach has shaped a career focused on translating supply chain and operations management research into practical, technology-enabled solutions. As a Professor at the University of South Africa (UNISA), her work spans operations management, supply chain systems and information systems, with an emphasis on applied innovation across sectors where logistics and coordination directly affect service delivery.

Her research has produced a portfolio of applied innovations in areas including healthcare supply chains, e-commerce logistics and research management systems. These projects aim to demonstrate how supply chain theory can be translated into usable digital tools in complex operational environments.

One of her key innovations is ACTs, a mobile-based application designed to support coordination within artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT) supply chains used in malaria treatment programmes. Developed with postgraduate students, the system addresses challenges in last-mile distribution by supporting communication and coordination among healthcare providers, suppliers, NGOs and public sector stakeholders. The innovation has received recognition through industry competitions and has been explored for commercial application through institutional licensing processes at UNISA.

A second innovation, Dilivari, originated from her doctoral research into e-grocery distribution systems. The platform explores a crowdsourced delivery model that uses community-based logistics to improve delivery efficiency, reduce transport costs and lower environmental impact. The concept has been tested in pilot settings in collaboration with academic partners and industry stakeholders.

A third innovation, the Research Methods Index (RMI), applies systems thinking to the research process itself by modelling research activities as an integrated workflow system. It has received international recognition in academic innovation contexts and attracted interest from external institutions for potential application.

Across these and related projects, Mkansi’s work focuses on the intersection between supply chain efficiency, digital platforms and sustainable development outcomes.

She notes that her work with students has been central to this process. “The team was totally ecstatic when users of our innovation achieved ISO certification,” she says. “It showed students how research can support innovation, improve productivity and contribute to digital solutions in healthcare.”

From 2022 to 2025, Mkansi served in a senior research leadership role within UNISA’s College of Economic and Management Sciences, where she focused on strengthening research capacity, supporting funding applications and promoting innovation-led research culture. During this period, she supported colleagues in securing external research funding from a range of national and international organisations, and contributed to the development of postgraduate research output across the college.

Her supervision record includes master’s and doctoral graduates, with additional students currently in progress. She has also supported postgraduate training and research development through workshops, mentorship and cross-disciplinary collaboration initiatives within the university.

Her broader work includes engagement with industry and international academic partners to strengthen the link between research and applied innovation. She has delivered talks and training on research commercialisation and innovation pathways, including a TEDx presentation at UNISA focused on the role of research in driving innovation.

Her approach remains consistent across her work: research should not end with publication, but should contribute to practical systems, institutional capacity and real-world impact.

Engineering Research Capacity Development Award

Professor Sudesh Sivarasu’s work is focused on a clear objective: designing accessible medical devices for resource-constrained settings while training the next generation of biomedical engineers to develop similar solutions. For him, the devices matter, but the people matter more.

When he joined the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2011 as a Lecturer, biomedical engineering in South Africa was still an emerging field. Postgraduate training in medical device design was limited, and structured pathways for translating research into clinical or commercial solutions were still developing. Sivarasu identified this gap as a systemic challenge affecting both innovation and healthcare delivery, and began building a training and research ecosystem to address it.

Over time, this work has developed into a structured postgraduate programme focused on biomedical engineering, medical device design and translational innovation. A key outcome has been the training of a large cohort of postgraduate researchers across PhD, master’s, honours and postdoctoral levels. His students have progressed into roles in academia, industry and entrepreneurship, with several contributing to medical device development and start-up creation.

A defining feature of his work is the Medical Device Design curriculum developed at UCT, which integrates clinical needs assessment, design thinking, prototyping, regulatory awareness and intellectual property considerations. This curriculum is designed to support the full pathway from concept to application within health systems.

Central to this approach is the FrugalBiodesign™ methodology, which emphasises designing medical devices for affordability, manufacturability and clinical relevance in low-resource environments. Rather than assuming high-resource settings, the framework focuses on constraint-driven innovation that prioritises usability and accessibility in local healthcare systems. The methodology has been shared through academic publications, teaching programmes and international collaborations.

In addition to teaching and supervision, Sivarasu has contributed to strengthening biomedical engineering capacity through institutional development. The Biomedical Engineering Research Centre at UCT has grown into a multi-laboratory research environment supporting biomedical engineering research, prototyping and translation, with sustained external funding and industry engagement.

He has also played a role in advancing professional recognition for biomedical engineering in South Africa through engagement with national engineering bodies, contributing to the formalisation of the discipline within the country’s professional engineering framework.

His research output includes a portfolio of patents, publications and device prototypes developed in collaboration with students and research partners. Several innovations emerging from his programme have progressed to spin-out companies founded by graduates, contributing to the broader medical technology ecosystem in South Africa. His work has also contributed to health technology innovation projects during the COVID-19 response, including collaborations linked to ventilator development and protective equipment production initiatives.

A key feature of his model is the emphasis on capacity development. His supervision record includes postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers, many of whom have gone on to careers in academia, industry and entrepreneurship. He also supports training through workshops, structured programmes and collaborative international partnerships.

South Africa remains heavily dependent on imported medical devices, making local innovation and manufacturing capacity an important strategic priority. Sivarasu’s work addresses this challenge by focusing on training researchers who can contribute to localised design and development of medical technologies.

“The most durable thing we build is people,” he says. “And people go on to build everything else.”

NSTF-Water Research Commission (WRC) Award

The story of how Professor Patricia Forbes found her calling begins in a lecture theatre at the University of Natal in Durban in 1993. She was part of the first intake of students for a newly introduced Environmental Chemistry module, and what she encountered there changed the direction of her life. "The lecturers and the content of this course really opened my eyes to environmental issues and how chemistry is fundamental to understanding and solving these problems," she says. "I realised that I had found my calling, to use my chemistry knowledge to address environmental challenges and assist in the protection thereof."

The path from that lecture theatre to her current role as Professor and Head of the Environmental Monitoring and Sensing research group at the University of Pretoria (UP) and Editor-in-Chief of the American Chemical Society's Earth and Space Chemistry journal was not straightforward. After graduating with her honours degree in chemistry, Forbes entered the mining industry, eventually becoming the youngest person and the first woman to hold an Environmental Manager position at a large multinational mining company. Working in industry sharpened a concern that would define her research agenda: there was almost no local capacity for environmental analysis in South Africa (SA). Samples were being sent to overseas laboratories at enormous cost, in some cases almost R60,000 per sample for compounds like dioxins, which meant monitoring was minimal and delayed. That constraint became the engine of her research.

She completed her master's degree part-time while managing an environmental laboratory, then moved to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) where she headed an environmental laboratory while completing her PhD, also part-time, during the period she was raising her daughter. The PhD, awarded in 2010, focused on a new laser-based technique for pollution monitoring. It was the beginning of a programme that has now produced over 100 peer-reviewed publications since 2015 (121 in total), including papers in high-impact journals, four featured journal front covers, Editor’s Choice mentions, and 49 invited, keynote and plenary talks at leading international conferences.

Her research group develops a versatile toolkit of analytical methods for detecting trace organic pollutants in water, including pharmaceuticals, pesticides, industrial chemicals and emerging contaminants that enter water systems at concentrations invisible to the eye but harmful over time. At the high-sensitivity end, her group develops mass spectrometry-based methods capable of identifying individual pollutants at trace concentrations. At the screening end, novel fluorescence sensors allow rapid, cost-effective assessment of water samples in the field without sending them to a laboratory. Only samples that test positive are then subjected to the more expensive techniques. This tiered approach directly addresses SA’s resource constraints while maintaining world-class analytical rigour.

A flagship innovation is the graphene wool (GW) sorbent, a material that extracts organic pollutants from water with high efficiency. A provisional South African patent was filed in February 2019, followed by an international Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) application in January 2020, and a patent granted in China in 2024. The dioxin work she described from her industry days has also been advanced through a PhD study in her group, which developed a new dioxin analysis method now implemented in a commercial environmental laboratory in SA, significantly reducing reliance on expensive overseas analysis.

In 2024 she was listed in the top 2% of researchers globally in her field according to the Elsevier citation indicator. She holds an NRF C1 rating, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and a Member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) (elected 2025). She serves as an expert for International Standardization Organization (ISO), the South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) and the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and Environment (DFFE). In 2025 she was appointed as the only African member to the Task Team on Exhaust Gas Cleaning Systems of GESAMP, the United Nations inter-agency body for the scientific protection of the marine environment, hosted by the International Maritime Organization in London.

She has supervised 10 PhD and 27 MSc students, many of whom have received national and international awards. Twenty-nine honours students have also been supervised, ten of whom continued to masters and PhD degrees under her guidance. Her SpecUP educational spectrophotometer, a cost-effective, self-assembled instrument that allows students to engage directly with the components inside a commercial instrument, has been distributed to 27 institutions across 20 countries, earning the Wharton QS Reimagine Education Award for Presence Learning in 2015 and the SA Chemical Institute (SACI) Chemical Education Award in 2014. She is now mentoring a young Tanzanian academic researching the impact of pesticides on freshwater ecosystems and co-supervising PhD students at Maasai Mara University in Kenya.

Her advice carries the same directness as her research: "Having a passion for what you do is essential, as is wanting to make a difference in the world. Make the most of every opportunity that comes your way, no matter how big or small, and build on each success."

NSTF-SAMRC Clinician-Scientist Award

There is a moment every neurosurgeon knows, the moment a child is brought in with symptoms that should have prompted investigation months, or even years, earlier. The tumour is there, it has been there, but nothing detected it in time. For Prof Llewellyn Padayachy, Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Pretoria (UP) and Director of the Brain Tumour and Translational Neuroscience Centre (BTC@UP) at Steve Biko Academic Hospital, that moment is the reason he does what he does.

"Children with brain tumours often present much later than they should have," he says. "Despite advances in treatment, the ability to detect these tumours earlier remains our best opportunity to improve outcome."

He did not arrive at this work by chance. He arrived at it the hard way, through years of building a clinical practice, a research programme and an international network in an environment where clinician-scientists face, as he puts it, "a particularly challenging pathway, given the high clinical workload and relatively limited access to funding." What kept him going was a conviction, and a question: if the eye is a window to the brain, what can it tell us that our current instruments cannot?

The answer, it turns out, is quite a lot. The optic nerve runs from the brain to the eye, surrounded by a sheath that expands measurably when pressure rises inside the skull. A growing brain tumour increases that pressure. By developing and validating a suite of non-invasive, point-of-care diagnostic tools including automated pupillometry, intra-ocular manometry, visual field assessment, fundoscopy, optical coherence tomography and transorbital ultrasound, Padayachy and his team have been building a system that can detect raised intracranial pressure without a single incision. The reliability of the technique is comparable in principle to using a thermometer to detect fever: a simple, accessible screening tool that changes what is possible at primary healthcare level.

The centrepiece is the Deformability Index, a novel dynamic ultrasound-based technique for assessing the pulsatile, elastic nature of the optic nerve sheath, and one of the first approaches of its kind to use dynamic imaging for non-invasive intracranial pressure assessment. Its description was published in high-impact international journals and cited widely. The technique was patented, and led directly to the formation of Nisonic AS, a Norwegian spin-off company that raised venture seed funding, filed additional patented methods, manufactured the P100 prototype machine and deployed units to university hospitals for early clinical verification. Independent verification followed through a PhD study by Dr Netteland from Oslo University, including peer-reviewed publications confirming the technique in adults. Clinical research collaborations have since followed with centres in the United States, Italy, Germany and Norway.

That international reach was seeded by a decision that Padayachy describes as the most personally challenging of his career. In 2017, he received the Hamilton Naki Clinical Research Scholarship to spend a year at the University of Oxford learning non-invasive imaging techniques. "Relocating my family was a guilt-ridden endeavour," he says, "but fortunately in retrospect one of the most valuable life lessons." He returned with skills, collaborators and a sharper sense of what was possible, and built BTC@UP’s international network to include leading researchers at Oxford, Harvard University, the Carlo Besta Neurological Institute in Milan, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and the Eberhardt Karls University of Tübingen.

In 2016, his work on optic nerve sheath assessment received the Anthony Raimondi Award from the International Society for Pediatric Neurosurgery, one of the society’s highest honours. His NRF B2 rating was awarded in 2020. In 2025 he received both the UP’s Exceptional Academic Achiever Award and a Clinical Excellence Award at the South African Health Excellence Awards.

The BTC@UP now rests on three research pillars: epidemiology and early detection, surgical and intra-operative adjuncts and neurorehabilitation, and a translational laboratory. The neuro-ophthalmology laboratory has generated 15 master’s-level research projects, with 6 graduates to date. Seventeen master’s students have completed under his direct supervision, with 10 currently in progress and 4 doctoral students in development. Twelve BSc Honours students have been co-supervised, four of whom continued to master’s degrees. His publication record spans 67 accredited journal articles, an h-index of 16, 8 book chapters and 167 conference proceedings.

Beyond the laboratory, Padayachy has established the continental African Paediatric Neurosurgery Section (AfPNS), which he describes as one of the most meaningful achievements of his career. A TEDxTableMountain talk brought the innovation to broader audiences. Features in Times Higher Education, The Conversation, the World Economic Forum agenda and a primetime eNCA interview have carried the message further.

He advises young clinician-scientists simply: "Do what needs to be done to the best of your ability always, by preparing as thoroughly as possible. Serendipity favours the well prepared."

The data from the neuro-ophthalmology laboratory is now being analysed, and Padayachy says the team is “extremely excited” about what it is showing. The goal is to create nomograms and diagnostic thresholds for non-invasively detecting raised intracranial pressure, work that could, if embedded in portable handheld ultrasound systems through software being explored, make early brain tumour screening more accessible at primary care level across South Africa and the continent.

The tumours are there. The tools to find them sooner are almost ready.

NSTF-TIA Green Economy Award

Prof Fortune Ganda identified his research problem early and has never let go of it. Developing nations need rapid economic growth. They are also the most vulnerable to climate change, biodiversity loss and ecological degradation. And the financial models that were supposed to help them navigate both realities at once had a fundamental flaw: they could not see environmental costs at all.

"I knew I had to build the bridge between commerce, data science, and environmental sustainability," he says. "My passion is driven by the mission to prove that in the Global South, environmental stewardship and long-term financial viability are not mutually exclusive but mutually reinforcing."

As Professor and Head of the Department of Management Accounting and Finance at Walter Sisulu University (WSU) in Mthatha, a historically disadvantaged institution in the Eastern Cape, Ganda has spent the past decade building that bridge. His research develops what he calls the Green Finance-Environment Nexus: a transdisciplinary analytical framework that uses advanced computational econometrics to quantify, with scientific precision, how financial development, eco-innovation, green goods trade and ICT (information and communication technologies) adoption interact with carbon emissions and material footprints in Sub-Saharan Africa and the BRICS economies. (BRICS = Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (SA))

The methodological contribution is specific and significant. Where conventional economic models apply standard linear regression to environmental datasets, Ganda uses Method of Moments Panel Quantile Regression and System Generalised Method of Moments (System GMM) panel VAR modelling. These approaches reveal the non-linear dynamics at play, the precise elasticity of specific green variables at different stages of economic development, and produce what he calls Sustainability Accounting: abstract biodiversity and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals translated into standardised, measurable financial metrics that policymakers and corporate boards can actually use. His models provide the empirical basis for fiscal instruments such as SA’s Carbon Tax and Health Promotion Levy, and equip corporations with the evidence to align their budgets with environmental governance requirements.

The publication record reflects sustained output across more than 42 peer-reviewed articles in high-impact, SAPSE-accredited international journals, including the Journal of Cleaner Production, Energy Strategy Reviews and Environmental Science and Pollution Research. His 2019 Journal of Cleaner Production paper on the impact of innovation and technology investments on carbon emissions has been cited over 575 times, positioning it as benchmark literature in global environmental economics. He holds an NRF Y2 rating and an h-index of 24. He serves as Guest Editor and Editorial Board member for Discover Sustainability, Sustainability and Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy, and has received multiple Elsevier Outstanding Reviewing Awards from journals including Ecological Economics and the Energy Journal. Between 2019 and 2025, he was consistently recognised as Most Productive Researcher at WSU at both faculty and campus level, with research incentives exceeding R700,000 reinvested into postgraduate development.

What distinguishes Ganda’s contribution from purely academic economics is his insistence that the work reach the people who need it. He developed a Financial Management for Green Economy short course delivered to taxi industry owners in Limpopo, demonstrating directly to transport operators how green efficiency reduces costs. Through Short Learning Programmes in the Eastern Cape, he supports the Public Sector Accounting Certificate and Local Governance Accounting Advanced Certificate, equipping municipal finance staff with tools to align public budgets with environmental governance. He maintains a public GitHub repository where his econometric models, datasets and analytical code are freely available without journal paywalls.

"Your geography does not dictate your impact," he says. "True academic leadership involves translating complex data into accessible tools that empower communities, inform policy, and drive real-world economic transitions."

His curriculum transformation work at WSU reflects the same long-term thinking. He led the design of a Postgraduate Diploma, Master of Commerce and Doctor of Commerce in Management Accounting and Finance, all embedding ESG frameworks at their core, which received Council of Higher Education (CHE) accreditation in 2025 and Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) accreditation shortly after, with South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) registration pending for a 2027 rollout. The Postgraduate Diploma’s CIMA accreditation gives graduates direct exemptions and entry into the Management Level Case Study, placing WSU graduates on a globally recognised professional pathway for the first time. He has also taught in Leuphana University (Germany) STEP entrepreneurship programme, serves on the NRF Oversight Committee, and has supervised 11 master’s and 2 doctoral candidates to completion.

He has supervised research ranging from the effective application of SA’s Sugar Tax to the environmental sustainability implications of digital technology adoption, ensuring that the academic pipeline flowing out of WSU is trained from the outset to see finance and ecology as inseparable.

Operating from a rural, historically disadvantaged institution presents real constraints, limited networks, constrained infrastructure, and persistent pressure on talented researchers to move to better-resourced urban centres. Ganda’s response is characteristically direct. He went to where the problems were, built the evidence base, and sent it into the world free of charge. SA’s economic growth model is still deeply entangled with fossil fuels and resource extraction. Untangling it requires evidence, and evidence is precisely what he provides.

Science Diplomacy for Africa Award

When Prof Malik Maaza arrived back in Africa in early 1997, the continent had almost no presence in the emerging field of nanosciences and nanotechnologies. The discipline barely existed as a formal field anywhere in the world. Richard Feynman had imagined it; the tools to practise it were only beginning to materialise. Maaza saw not an absence, but an opportunity.

What followed was nearly three decades of patient, determined, continent-building science diplomacy. As UNESCO Africa Chair in nanosciences and nanotechnologies, Professor at University of South Africa (UNISA) and Senior Scientist at iThemba LABS/NRF in Somerset West, Maaza has built from scratch a continental infrastructure for nanoscience research, training and policy influence. He has done it not by waiting for the resources to arrive, but by connecting people, building platforms and using science as the language of diplomacy.

The first move came in 1999, when he co-initiated the African Laser Centre in Johannesburg together with the then Department of Science and Technology’s (DST) Director-General Dr Philemon Mjwara. Endorsed by the African Union as a NEPAD flagship programme and administered by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the Centre funds bilateral and multilateral laser and photonics research projects across African institutions annually. That same year, following a memorandum of understanding between the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) and South Africa’s National Research Foundation (NRF), he co-initiated the African Materials Research Society, now headquartered in Gaborone, Botswana, which holds biannual international conferences rotating across the continent: Kigali in 2024, Nairobi in 2026, Rabat in 2028. He also co-initiated the South African Nanotechnology Initiative (SANi) in 1999, whose strategy was formally adopted by the DST in 2006 and became the foundation of SA’s national nanotechnology policy.

In 2005, he launched the Nanosciences African Network (NANOAFNET) at the IAEA-ICTP in Trieste, Italy, under the patronage of UNESCO, IAEA, TWAS and ICS-UNIDO. By 2013, the network had grown into the UNESCO Africa NanoChair, established in Paris with the full backing of UNESCO and the South African Commission. In early 2025, the Chair was elevated again, becoming the African Centre of Competencies in Enhanced Nanotechnologies for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (ACCENTS), launched in Pretoria. Each upgrade has reflected not just institutional confidence, but measurable delivery. Each year, approximately 15 to 17 African postgraduate students, early-career and senior scientists are supported financially to conduct research at ACCENTS and the UNESCO Chair headquarters at UNISA and iThemba LABS/NRF. In total, since 2005, approximately 199 postgraduates (78 master’s and 121 PhDs) from across Africa and the Global South have been trained through these platforms, with more than 150 junior and senior scientists additionally mentored.

The platforms have served another purpose that Maaza is particularly proud of: providing a refuge and a professional home for scientists from conflict zones. Researchers from Sudan, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, Rwanda and Iran have been supported through these programmes. Science in his hands is not just a tool for development. It is also a form of solidarity.

The policy footprint is equally substantial. His work contributed to the South African Nanotechnology Initiative, the national photonics strategy, the Advanced Manufacturing and Technology Strategy and the National Nanotechnology Equipment Programme. Continentally, his platforms shaped the African Union’s (AU) STISA 2063 vision and the UNECA strategy for centres of excellence in nanosciences and medicine. Internationally, they fed into the United Nations (UN)/UNESCO International Year of Light-based Technologies (2015) and the UN/UNESCO International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (2025). He has initiated or co-implemented no fewer than 13 ongoing national, continental and international science, technology and innovation (STI) platforms, all endorsed by the AU, European Union (EU), UN or UNESCO.

The scientific output across this network is formidable. Approximately 500 co-authored publications carry his collaborative fingerprints, published in high-impact journals including the Nature Scientific Reports family. His H-index stands at approximately 112, with about 41,000 citations and an i10-index of approximately 610. Since 2005, his fundraising for these platforms has reached an estimated R296.7 million. He holds an NRF B1 rating and has received approximately 32 international awards and recognitions, among them: the AU Continental Kwame Nkrumah Excellence Award in Science and Technology (Addis Ababa, 2017), the Presidential Mapungubwe Silver National Order (Pretoria, 2019), the Galileo Galilei International Commission for Optics Award (Dresden, 2019) and the International Union for Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) Award (Haikou, China, 2024). He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the African Academy of Sciences (AAS) and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.

His message to young people is simple and drawn from the words of Nelson Mandela: "It always seems impossible until it’s done." It is a philosophy that describes his own career as precisely as anything else ever could.

NSTF–Agricultural Research Council (ARC) Award

"Why, in a country with abundant land and capable people, are millions of South Africans still going to bed hungry?" That question, asked years ago by Claire Blanckenberg, became the founding logic of Reel Life NPC (non-profit company). "What started as curiosity became conviction," she says. "When I realised that the gap was not willingness but access, access to the right tools, the right knowledge and the right support, I knew there was a practical solution to build."

In one sentence, Blanckenberg describes what she does as building "food-secure, climate-resilient communities in South Africa (SA) by equipping households and schools with practical, scalable gardening solutions that turn dependency into dignity and subsistence into income." Reel Life NPC, the public benefit organisation she founded, works at the intersection of food security, nutrition and livelihoods. Its flagship programmes are the Household Garden Programme, launched in 2021, and the Income Programme, launched in 2023, both built around the organisation's patented Garden in a Box kits, pre-packed by area, season and crop type.

The technology is deceptively simple and deliberately engineered to remove every obstacle a first-time grower faces. The patented system reduces water consumption by 80%, saving 11.3 litres per square metre planted, while delivering an average harvest yield of 10.13 kg per square metre. The Department of Basic Education’s (DBE) School Nutrition Education Programmes integrate 400 square metre productive gardens into school environments, connecting children to food production, nutrition literacy and future livelihood skills.

"Food insecurity in SA is not simply a supply problem, it is a systemic one," Blanckenberg says. "Reel Life addresses the structural barriers by making growing food simple, accessible and economically empowering for those who need it most." Underlying all of it is a conviction she states plainly: "Food sovereignty is a human right, and every household has the potential to produce, not just consume. We are not just distributing seeds, we are building agency."

The clearest proof of that philosophy is found not in statistics but in people. "One standout example is Ngcebo Zungu of Embheka Mix Farming, a beneficiary whose participation in our programme expanded from food security gardening to running an income-generating operation," Blanckenberg says. "Seeing a participant cross that threshold, from feeding their family to building a business, is the clearest possible confirmation that the work matters." Her organisation's Social Return on Investment analysis shows that for every R1 donated to the Household Garden Programme, R38.83 in social, economic, health and educational value is generated. "That number represents real households, real meals and real futures," she says.

The road to that evidence base was not easy. "Building a non-profit that must simultaneously serve communities, satisfy funders, manage field operations and evolve its model is not a linear journey," Blanckenberg says. "The greatest challenge has been securing sustainable, long-term funding in an environment where CSI and SED cycles are short and impact takes time to compound. We became rigorous about measurement, transparent about methodology and disciplined about quantifying value so that funders can see exactly what their investment produces." Her advice to others entering the social impact space is direct: "Your story is only as powerful as your evidence. Build your monitoring and evaluation systems from day one, not as an afterthought."

What keeps her motivated is the scale of what remains possible. SA has approximately 18 million low-income households, Blanckenberg notes, and if the Reel Life model can redirect even a fraction of household budgets away from store-bought vegetables towards home-grown produce, the macroeconomic effect could be transformational, with an estimated R50 billion redirected annually at national scale. At community level, enabling 1,000 households in a single community frees an estimated R2.77 million annually, enough, she says, to produce a 33% boost in shelter spending, a 367% uplift in water access and over 1,100% growth in micro-enterprise investment capacity.

The organisation's current frontier is the expansion of the Income Programme, moving participants beyond subsistence gardening into commercial micro-enterprise. "This is where food security intersects with economic empowerment, and it represents the next frontier of what community-based agriculture can achieve," Blanckenberg says. She is candid about the tension this creates: communities in crisis need immediate relief, but lasting change requires patient, multi-year investment in skills, systems and behaviour change. "We are focused on building both a rapid impact story and a long-term theory of change."

Her definition of success is structural rather than personal. "I will know we have reached our goal when Reel Life's model is embedded in national food security policy frameworks and replicated at scale by government and private sector partners alike," she says. "Every new corporate partnership, every school garden commissioned and every income grower who earns their first sale brings that vision a step closer."

Reel Life NPC proves, in Blanckenberg's words, that addressing food insecurity "does not require complex, expensive infrastructure. It requires the right design, the right data and deep respect for the communities you serve." Her patented, low-water gardening system was born from listening to what households actually needed: something simple enough for a first-time grower, productive enough to feed a family and scalable enough to become an income source.

Research Software Award

When the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) reaches full operation, it will generate more data per day than most institutions can store, let alone explore. Thousands of astronomers around the world will need a way to navigate through terabytes of radio frequency observations to find the galaxies, hydrogen clouds and cosmic structures hidden within. CARTA, the Cube Analysis and Rendering Tool for Astronomy, is already the tool they reach for.

Developed since 2018 through an international consortium, CARTA's architectural design and project management are led by South Africa's Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA), working alongside the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in the United States, the University of Alberta in Canada and, more recently, the Australian SKA Regional Centre. The Team Leader is Prof Russ Taylor, Chair of the CARTA Management Team. The Technical Lead is Prof Rob Simmonds, Associate Director of IDIA and Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Cape Town (UCT), who is also chief technology officer (CTO) for the ilifu computing cluster on which CARTA's South African services are hosted.

Simmonds arrived at this work by an unusual route. "My background is in Mathematics and Computing. I particularly enjoy creating computational solutions to solve scientific problems," he says. Before coming to South Africa, he was CTO of Compute Canada, the organisation providing large-scale computing and storage systems for most Canadian academic research. "I was brought to South Africa due to my involvement in the computing architecture design for the SKA telescope," he says, describing a career built on solving the infrastructure problems that make modern data-intensive science possible.

CARTA addresses a problem that grows more urgent every year: radio astronomy generates datasets too large to download, copy or move without enormous cost and delay. CARTA's client-server architecture solves this by keeping the data and computation on powerful remote servers at SKA Regional Centres and major observatories, while delivering high-performance, GPU-accelerated interactive visualisation to a user's own web browser, wherever they are in the world. It currently supports production use of 4-terabyte data cubes and is being developed to handle 16-terabyte cubes within five years.

"CARTA is a major component of the ALMA Regional Centres (ALMA = Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array), is used extensively for MeerKAT science (MeerKAT is the South African precursor for the SKA array of radio telescopes in the Northern Cape), and forms part of the SKA Regional Centre design," Simmonds says. "It is used by NRAO for work on the very large array (VLA) telescope [in New Mexico], and with the architecture improvements designed by IDIA in the past year, it should also be the main visual analytics tool used for the ngVLA telescope [next generation very large telescope]. For South Africa, the SKA telescope is a major science initiative. Having a system that has been architected in South Africa being a key part of end-user experience for SKA users is one demonstrator of South Africa's contributions to SKA science."

The numbers behind that claim are substantial. More than 6,000 astronomers worldwide use CARTA. It has been cited in over 159 peer-reviewed publications, with 2,554 citations between them. CARTA is deployed at all three ALMA Science Regional Centres, the ilifu cluster at IDIA, the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Australia, CANFAR in Canada, and a growing number of SKA-related institutions internationally. In South Africa, 236 ilifu users have accessed CARTA services directly, including 75 PhD students, 70 master’s students and 30 postdoctoral fellows.

Users describe the software's impact in unambiguous terms. "CARTA is already game-changing for astronomers who are looking at SKA precursor and pathfinder data," says Dr Shari Breen, Head of Science Operations at the SKA Observatory. "Without it I would struggle to view huge data cubes from the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP)." Prof D.J. Pisano of UCT, who has used CARTA since its first beta release in 2018, calls it "the only software I now use to visualise and do the initial analysis of my data."

The software is fully open source under the GPL-3.0-or-later licence and freely available on GitHub. Every code contribution is reviewed by at least two developers before merging, and the team has taken a deliberate position on a contemporary risk: a human expert in the relevant component must take final responsibility for every code contribution, even as artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted development tools become more common. The team also runs an annual CARTA image competition, open to anyone using the software, which has already produced award-winning entries from South African postgraduate students.

For Simmonds, the daily challenge is less technical than financial. "Gaining funding to work on the most interesting projects. So far I have found enough funding to keep going," he says. What keeps him motivated is the scale of who he gets to work with. "It is hard to think of one point," he says, reflecting on the most rewarding part of his career. "I think it is that I have got to collaborate with some very brilliant people, which would not have happened if I had not managed to become involved in so many impactful projects."

As the SKA era begins, South African-architected software will sit at the centre of how the world's astronomers see what the telescope finds.

NSTF-SADiLaR Research Software Award: Human Language Technologies (HLT)

Building the words South Africa was missing online

Prof Vukosi Marivate set out to solve a problem few people were treating as urgent: most of the world’s AI systems could not understand isiZulu, Sesotho or Xitsonga. TextAugment is his team’s answer.

The global artificial intelligence (AI) revolution has a language problem, and Prof Vukosi Marivate identified it early.

"The current AI revolution is largely being built on the data, cultural contexts, and priorities of the Global North," he says. "If we do not actively build our own tools, African societies will merely become consumers of technologies that do not understand our languages, nuances, or societal needs."

Marivate, Professor of Computer Science, ABSA UP Chair of Data Science and Director of the African Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (AfriDSAI) at the University of Pretoria (UP), recognised that modern AI systems depend on something many African languages simply do not have: large volumes of digitised text.

Languages such as isiZulu, Sesotho and Xitsonga have historically been left behind because there is far less online data available compared with English, Mandarin and other data-rich languages. Without that data, developing AI tools that can understand, translate and respond in African languages becomes significantly more difficult.

Working with Mr Tshephisho Sefara, now Senior Data Scientist and AI Specialist at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), and later joined by Mr Isheanesu Dzingirai, Marivate set out to build a solution that could help close that gap.

The result was TextAugment, an open-source software library released in 2019 through Marivate’s Data Science for Social Impact (DSFSI) research lab. The software artificially expands smaller text datasets using linguistic augmentation techniques, including WordNet, Word2Vec, FastText and translation-based methods.

In practical terms, it gives researchers more data to work with, allowing them to build more accurate language models, sentiment analysis tools and translation systems even when the original datasets are limited.

"TextAugment acts as a force multiplier, allowing local researchers, students and developers to build highly accurate language models using limited data," Marivate says. "Language is the ultimate vehicle for human dignity and access. If our languages are not integrated into the digital world, our people are effectively locked out of the future economy."

The software’s influence has extended beyond South Africa. It has been cited in research involving Swahili machine translation, Arabic text classification and Azerbaijani natural language processing, alongside its original applications in isiZulu, Sesotho, Setswana and Sepedi.

The foundational paper describing the methodology, published by Marivate and Sefara in 2020, has received more than 160 citations on Google Scholar. The GitHub repository has attracted interest from the global developer community, and the software is used as a learning resource in the University of Pretoria’s (UP) Masters in IT (Big Data Science) programme, as well as in international natural language processing tutorials and industry guides focused on data augmentation.

For Marivate, the technical achievement matters, but the bigger impact is what it represents.

"A snapshot moment that stands out is seeing a student or a grassroots developer use TextAugment to train an AI model for their own local language, completely independently," he says. "When you see an indigenous language thriving inside a modern neural network because of a tool you helped build, you realise you are not just writing code, you are restoring digital dignity."

That belief has shaped a career built around collaboration rather than individual achievement. Marivate co-founded the Deep Learning Indaba and the Masakhane Research Foundation, two movements that have become central to African researchers building AI tools for the continent’s languages.

In 2022, he also co-founded Lelapa AI, an Africa-focused AI research and product laboratory.

"The most exhilarating shift right now is the rise of sovereign, local AI research labs and grassroots foundations across Africa," he says. "We are moving past the phase of merely adapting Western models."

The challenges have not been purely technical. They have been structural.

"The biggest hurdle has always been the structural scarcity of resources, both in terms of curated linguistic data and computing infrastructure tailored for Africa," Marivate says. "We had to challenge global scepticism by innovating at the software and methodological levels, proving that smart data engineering could bypass massive infrastructure gaps. Constraints should not limit our ambition; instead, they should dictate our creativity."

TextAugment has now reached version 3.0, which the team expects to be its final major release before a successor project takes its place. Components of its augmentation methods have also contributed to NL-Augmenter, a larger international research project focused on improving natural language processing resources.

The collaboration between the UP and the CSIR has created what Marivate describes as "a shared ecosystem for HLT in Africa", one that extends beyond any single piece of software.

His advice to young researchers reflects the philosophy behind everything he has built.

"Do not wait for permission to build for your community, and do not let global benchmarks dictate what is worth researching," he says. "If you see a digital gap in your local language, your society, or your environment, treat it as a premier scientific frontier. Your local context is not a limitation, it is your greatest competitive advantage."

Data for Research Award

South Africa (SA) is one of only 17 megadiverse countries on Earth. Its biological wealth, the fynbos, the Karoo, the grasslands, the coral reefs, the freshwater systems and the marine environments along two ocean coastlines, underpins food security, water security, agriculture, fisheries, tourism and resilience to climate change.

Knowing whether that wealth is thriving or declining is not an academic question. It is a governance imperative.

The National Biodiversity Assessment (NBA) 2025, led by a Core Data Team of 21 scientists and biodiversity specialists under Team Leader Prof Andrew Skowno, is the most rigorous and comprehensive assessment of SA’s biodiversity to date.

"The NBA 2025 is not only a tool for the environment sector, but also a resource for government, business, communities and all South Africans," wrote Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, Willem Aucamp in the foreword to the assessment’s summary publication, launched by the Deputy Minister in December 2025 after a six-year process.

The NBA is SA’s primary tool for monitoring and reporting on the state of its biodiversity. It is the country’s health check of nature.

Over the past two decades, its scope has grown from a terrestrial and marine ecosystem assessment into a comprehensive evaluation of all ecosystems across all realms, species assessments spanning 13 taxonomic groups, and, for the first time in 2025, four new genetic diversity indicators, representing one of the newest frontiers in global biodiversity science.

The 2025 edition drew on the expertise of approximately 490 specialists from 110 institutions, coordinated by the Core Data Team operating from the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) and partner organisations including the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Nelson Mandela University (NMU), the Free State Department of Environmental Affairs and the University of Cape Town (UCT).

"What is so exciting to see is how the content of the NBA has grown, and also how the people involved in the NBA have grown in numbers and skills," says Skowno, who has led two editions of the assessment, the 2018 and 2025 releases.

Participation has grown from approximately 14 people in 2004 to nearly 500 specialists and 110 institutions involved in 2025. It is a model built around collaboration and collective ownership by SA’s biodiversity community.

The most significant innovation in NBA 2025 is not only what it measures, but how people can access it.

Previous editions produced large technical volumes that became outdated soon after publication. The Core Data Team, with early and mid-career professionals taking leading roles, built the NBA 2025 platform in-house using R, Quarto and GitHub.

The result is a living assessment of more than 100 webpages, each with its own recommended citation, documented data version and results version. Users can move from high-level summaries directly through to the underlying datasets, workflows and scripts stored in public repositories.

"Professional success, to me, is not measured by personal achievements, but by building something that endures beyond any one individual," Skowno says. "My goal has been to develop a well-functioning NBA system, supported by capable people, robust processes and transparent data systems, that can continue to deliver value regardless of who is leading it."

The reach of the NBA into policy and practice is already measurable.

A 2025 study by Da Silva and colleagues documented how NBA data has been used across South African governance, including informing the National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan, the White Paper on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of SA’s Biodiversity, the gazetted list of threatened ecosystems, and the National Spatial Development Framework published in 2023.

The framework was the first national spatial planning instrument of its kind to place biodiversity alongside social and economic development as a driver of the country’s future.

NBA ecosystem indicators are also embedded in Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) regulations under the National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act and are used to inform national biodiversity offset calculations. The assessment’s threat status indicators, developed ahead of equivalent global standards, also contributed to the evolution of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Ecosystems.

"In our view, the NBA is not merely a technical product, it is a national asset that continues to strengthen our environmental governance, improve the integrity of our reporting systems, and build a more informed and prepared community of practice," writes Ms Anna Mampye, Director: State of Environment Information at the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE), in her testimonial supporting the nomination.

The team’s biggest challenge was not ambition. It was resources.

"When we first started looking at the enormous amount of work it would take to bring the NBA into the information age, it felt very daunting, particularly because there was a very limited budget," Skowno says. "However, I have been extremely pleased with the work of the Core Data Team, who really rose to the challenge. The fact that we all had a vision of what the website could be and why we wanted to bring everything online is what kept all of us motivated."

The team’s advice to the next generation of biodiversity scientists reflects the skills that made NBA 2025 possible.

"Today’s biodiversity scientists need a diverse skill set that extends beyond traditional ecology and conservation science to include data science, coding, analytics, communication and collaboration," the team says. "Be curious, remain open to change, and never stop learning, because in science, as in life, the only constant is change."

South Africa has a national green hydrogen strategy and abundant renewable energy resources to support it. What it has lacked, until recently, is the homegrown scientific infrastructure needed to develop the advanced materials that will make green hydrogen production genuinely competitive. The JENano research team at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), led by Full Professor Tien Chien Jen, is building that infrastructure, one atom at a time.

Prof Jen holds the SARChI Chair for Green Hydrogen, is the Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering Science, and Director of the Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) Research Centre at UJ, the first ALD centre in South Africa and the facility around which the team's entire research programme is builtALD is a nanomanufacturing technique that allows scientists to build materials one ultra-thin layer at a time, with precision measured at the scale of individual atoms. In a world moving rapidly towards clean energy, it is the technology helping to create the next generation of battery materials, hydrogen production systems and hydrogen storage technologies.

The JENano team, which includes Dr Kingsley Ukoba, Patrick Imoisili, Dr Peter Oviroh, Dr Sina Karimzadeh and eight further postdoctoral fellows and researchers, works across three interconnected research frontiers. The first is green hydrogen production, where the team has collaborated with South African company Hydrox Holdings to develop a membraneless alkaline water-splitting system, an electrolyser that removes the expensive membrane component entirely and is expected to improve hydrogen production efficiency by 30% while reducing system cost and complexity. The second is hydrogen storage, where advanced nanomaterials are being developed to store greater amounts of hydrogen safely and efficiently. The third is battery technology, where ALD is being used to improve lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, producing prototype cells that charge faster, perform better and last longer than conventional designs.

"Success is a team effort," the JENano team says. "We work together as a multidisciplinary team which is the basis of our success. We will reach our goal when we are able to scale our technology and make it affordable to society."

The research combines advanced computer modelling with laboratory experimentation. Theoretical simulations guide the design of new materials before they are manufactured in the University's specialised ALD facility. The materials are then tested to determine how well they perform in real-world energy applications. The work is carried out at the UJ, with international collaborators including Nanjing Tech University and Shandong University in China, and Case Western Reserve University in the United States.

Prof Jen's own record provides the scientific foundation for the team. He holds an NRF B1 rating, an h-index of 60, and has authored more than 700 publications, including approximately 450 peer-reviewed journal articles across energy materials, nanomanufacturing and hydrogen technology. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (elected 2011), a Fellow of the Academy of Science of South Africa (inducted 2020), and holds the R20 million Sasol-NRF SARChI Chair in Green Hydrogen (2023-2028). Ten books have been published under his leadership, the most recent being Emerging Atomic Layer Deposition for Hydrogen Energy, published by Springer Nature in January 2025. He has directly supervised approximately 30 doctoral and more than 35 master's students to completion, with 12 doctoral and five master's students currently in progress.

The team is candid about the challenges. Access to specialised equipment requires collaboration with international partners. Import lead times for specialised materials increase costs. Scaling laboratory innovations into commercially viable technologies requires substantial infrastructure investment. But the trajectory is clear: early outcomes include PhD completions, high-impact publications, recognition as emerging experts in ALD and LFP technologies, and growing industry interest. A partnership with Mitochondria for Solid Oxide Electrolyzer Cell (SOEC) co-operation adds another pathway towards commercialisation. (SOECs are electrolysis devices that convert water into hydrogen using a solid ceramic electrolyte).

"There are problems which also come with opportunities," the team advises aspiring researchers. "Young scientists and researchers must put in the work required to stand them out. They also need to work with older colleagues in their respective fields for seamless transfer of knowledge and expertise they will require in the future."

South Africa imports the vast majority of the energy technologies it uses. The JENano team is working to ensure that at least some of what powers the country's future is designed, developed and validated here.

Poor indoor air quality kills quietly. In a deep-level mine, elevated concentrations of dust, gases and volatile organic compounds can reduce worker alertness, increase the risk of accidents and lead to errors long before any formal monitoring system registers a concern. In a hospital ward, an undetected air quality event can compromise patient recovery. In an office, elevated CO₂ silently suppresses concentration and productivity without anyone recognising the cause.

Prof Bruce Mellado, Professor of Physics at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), CEO of AIrSynQ Systems and Executive Director of the South African Consortium of Air Quality Monitoring (SACAQM), is building the system that changes this. AIrSynQ is a privately registered South African technology company that commercialises an integrated, AI-powered air quality intelligence platform combining affordable sensors, wireless communications and artificial intelligence (AI) to generate real-time, actionable insights for sectors including mining, hospitality, healthcare, commercial buildings and industry.

The technology did not begin in a corporate boardroom. It grew from SACAQM and its research platform, known as SACAQM/AI, which demonstrated that AI could be used to manage air quality at scale in a cost-effective way across a network of Gauteng sites, including hospitals, schools, libraries, research centres and community facilities. Those deployments became real-world testing grounds, allowing the team to refine its sensors, data systems, AI models and alert systems under everyday operating conditions. The validated research platform was then developed into a commercial product through AIrSynQ Systems.

The scientific innovation lies in what the team calls its "sense, interpret, predict, act" pipeline. AIrSynQ does far more than measure air quality. It uses AI to verify the quality of incoming data, detect unusual or potentially hazardous conditions in real time, and predict what is likely to happen next so that action can be taken before risks escalate. The result is a system that helps organisations protect workers, improve productivity, reduce avoidable losses and strengthen compliance with occupational health requirements.

The team behind the platform is structured across five divisions: executive leadership, AI and data science, systems and internet of things (IoT) engineering, software and cloud infrastructure, and commercial and deployment operations. Prof Mellado leads as CEO. Dr Edward Nkadimeng, who holds an NRF Y2 rating and completed his PhD in Physics in 2022, serves as Head of AI and Operations. Mr Dominique Adams heads marketing and commercial operations. Ten postgraduate researchers, including master's and doctoral students, are embedded across the programme, with named researchers including Manal Karmoude, Methembe Tshuma, Isaiah Chiraira and Vongani Chabalala contributing to the published science underpinning the platform. Manufacturing in South Africa is carried out through a partnership with Kutleng Engineering Technologies, while Africa Weather and Advannotech serve as distribution partners.

The publication record reflects the scientific foundation. Seven accredited journal articles were produced during the nomination period, alongside two conference proceedings and a book chapter. The work spans IoT systems for air quality monitoring using LTE/4G and LoRa communications (LoRa stands for long-range, and the wireless technology is especially useful for connecting IoT devices over large distances), AI-driven air quality monitoring, graph neural networks for PM2.5 forecasting (PM2.5 is ‘particulate matter’ which is smaller than 2.5 micrometers), and reinforcement learning for wireless sensor networks.

Recognition has arrived rapidly. In 2025 alone, AIrSynQ and its founders received the Presidential Award for AI for Technology Transfer, the inaugural Wits Vice-Chancellor Prize for Innovation, and the ODESS Prize from the Pierre Fabre Foundation. The company was also a Top 5 finalist in the Start-up Club ZA Start-up of the Year competition. Prof Mellado received the high-level Hundred Talent A Program award from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and was awarded a new NRF Research Chair in Particle Physics in the same year. He won the TW Kambule-NSTF Researcher Award in 2021 and holds an NRF B1 rating.

The commercial momentum is equally striking. Revenue has already been generated from the mining and hospitality sectors within months of the company's creation, with a strong pipeline of potential clients across multiple industries. The business model is built for sustainability. Public-interest and philanthropic projects helped prove the technology and build credibility. Commercial deployment through AIrSynQ Systems now provides a pathway to recurring subscription revenue and long-term operational support.

"Clean air should not be a luxury," the company says, "and African innovation can deliver world-class technologies that protect people while also helping organisations operate better." The evidence, so far, suggests it already is.

Prof Mike Bruton has a confession: he has developed a gaggle of groupies. They travel from across greater Cape Town to attend his talks, buy and read his books, and return to hear him again and again. One audience told him his talk on Paradoxical People, which asks, and attempts to answer, why the most intelligent animal that has ever evolved is unable to solve the most pressing environmental crises, was the best they had ever heard. He is 79 years old and approaching his eightieth birthday. He has no institutional funding for any of it. He does not intend to stop.

"I will continue to engage the public on the latest scientific discoveries and technological inventions until the day I die," he says, "secure in the knowledge that the young people I have tutored will continue to carry the torch."

Bruton's career began in formal science. He accumulated more than 130 peer-reviewed scientific papers and made internationally recognised contributions to the study of the coelacanth. But the thread that runs through everything, from his earliest days as a postgraduate student sketching patterns in the sand to explain his research to Thonga and Zulu communities in Zululand, to his current role as science communicator, consultant and author, is a conviction that scientists owe the public an honest account of what they have found out.

"Science and technology have not become mainstream interests of South Africans, like sport, music or dance," he says, "despite their vital importance in our lives." His entire second career, as an author, lecturer, museum developer, workshop facilitator and exhibition designer, has been a sustained attempt to change that.

The numbers from 2025 alone tell their own story. He gave 73 talks to 54 different organisations on 23 science and technology topics, including five at the University of Cape Town (UCT) Summer School. He runs 30 different illustrated talks, developing new ones every year in response to public demand. He has published 12 popular science books since 2015, has another in press with the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) on Islamic contributions to science and technology, and has three further books in preparation.

The highlight of the past two years was initiating and leading the Darwin2025 project in Cape Town. Darwin made a 19-day visit to the Cape Colony in May and June 1836, during the voyage of HMS Beagle that would ultimately produce On the Origin of Species. Bruton organised a series of events to mark and explain the significance of that visit, culminating in the permanent installation of a bronze bust of a young Charles Darwin on Simon's Town Jetty. The unveiling, attended by more than 180 people, was performed by Andrew Darwin, Charles's great-great-grandson, and the Deputy Mayor of Cape Town, Alderman Eddie Andrews. The celebrations also included a new play, Darwin, A Curious Mind, written by Sir Alexander McCall Smith and performed by South African actors Nicholas and Elizabeth Ellenbogen, talks by Prof George Branch and Bruton himself, and an art exhibition at the V&A Waterfront. The Darwin2025 project formed part of the broader international Darwin200 initiative, and the tall ship Oosterschelde, retracing the Beagle's route around the world, visited Cape Town in April 2025 as part of the celebrations. A documentary on the voyage, including the Cape Town visit, is currently being produced in the United Kingdom for broadcast on the BBC.

More than 200 educational kits produced by the Darwin2025 project have been donated to Western Cape schools. The bust on Simon's Town Jetty is already becoming a focal point for school group visits and discussions on evolution.

Bruton has been involved in science centre development across Africa and the Middle East for more than 30 years, co-founding the Cape Town Science Centre (CTSC) and serving as its Life Patron. He chaired the local and international organising committee of the Sixth Science Centre World Congress, held in Cape Town in 2011 and attended by more than 300 international leaders in science communication. He was the founding director of the Bahrain Science Centre, serving from 2012 to 2015, and was adviser to the director of the Museum of Science and Technology in Islam at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. He also co-founded SciFest Africa in Makhanda and remains a regular contributor to its programmes. The Trail's End Bicycle Museum in Grabouw, which he founded, is the only bicycle museum in Africa.

His awards include the Captain Scott Medal from the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1986), the Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques from the Government of France (2001), the NSTF Lifetime Award (2001), an honorary doctorate from Rhodes University (2012), and the Marloth Medal of the Royal Society of South Africa for outstanding lifetime contributions to science and science communication (2021).

His advice is directed at the scientists who come after him as much as at the public he reaches. "All scientists should make some effort to share their knowledge of science with the public after retirement," he says. "People are hungry for information in science and technology as long as it is dished up in a palatable way."

There is a moment that Prof Shaheed Hartley, Director and CEO of Advancing Knowledge Non-Profit Company (AK NPC), knows well. It is the moment a learner from a township or rural school walks into a purpose-built, fully equipped science laboratory for the first time and discovers that the experiments described in their textbook can actually be performed. That the equipment is real. That the chemicals exist. That science is not something that happens only in other people's schools.

"Sustainable improvement in science outcomes requires both confident, knowledgeable teachers and conducive learning environments," Hartley says. "You cannot have one without the other."

Advancing Knowledge NPC was established in 2019 in response to a set of inequalities its founders found impossible to accept. Research conducted by Hartley had identified persistent, measurable gaps in science and mathematics education in disadvantaged township and rural schools across South Africa: weak educator content knowledge, limited practical and experimental skills, inadequate laboratory infrastructure, and minimal learner exposure to inquiry-based STEM learning. (STEM = science, technology, engineering and mathematics.) Most historically disadvantaged schools had simply not been built with facilities to support practical experimentation. The absence was not incidental. It was systemic. And it was closing doors for an entire generation of young people before they had a chance to walk through them.

The response AK NPC designed is integrated and deliberately sequenced. Teacher training comes first, always, before any construction begins. Only when educators are equipped to use a laboratory does AK NPC build one. The three standardised Science Teaching and Learning Centre (TLC) models, designed by Hartley and copyright-registered in April 2022, convert ordinary classrooms or inadequate laboratories into fully equipped, CAPS-aligned, inquiry-based science environments. (CAPS = curriculum assessment policy statements, and refers to the official national school curriculum). Each includes smart boards, digital projection systems, WiFi-enabled infrastructure, purpose-designed workstations, secure chemical storage, safety-compliant ventilation, and a complete set of curriculum-aligned equipment. The laboratory design is itself an applied engineering contribution: a replicable, scalable prototype for STEM infrastructure reform in under-resourced settings.

Since 2019, AK NPC and its two principal partners, the Garden Cities Archway Foundation and the Western Cape Education Department (WCED), have constructed 67 Science TLCs: 60 in the Western Cape and seven in the Eastern Cape, with funding for a further 12 already secured for 2026. Each Science TLC costs approximately R1.75 million, a figure that represents a long-term capital investment with high educational returns. Together with its partners, AK NPC has raised more than R100 million since 2019 to make this possible. The list of schools reached reads like a map of Western Cape education, from Siyabulela Primary in Langa to Livingstone High in Lansdowne, from Silikamva High in Hout Bay to Morester Secondary in Oudtshoorn, from Gubevu Primary in the Amathole East Education District of the Eastern Cape to Groenberg Secondary in Grabouw.

The teacher development work is equally substantial. More than 1,000 educators have received training through over 35 South African Council for Educators (SACE)-accredited professional development courses since 2021, shifting science teaching from abstract, textbook-dependent instruction towards inquiry-based experimental learning. AK NPC also runs STEM clubs, science competitions, the Women in Mathematics role-modelling programme for Grade 11 girls, avionics exposure, and annual National Science Week roadshows reaching rural schools in communities across the West Coast, Cape Winelands and Overberg districts that rarely receive such visits. The annual Science Club Competition in Worcester has become a fixture in the Cape Winelands Education District calendar, drawing learners from 20 clubs.

Nowhere was that commitment more visible than at Gubevu Primary School in Nqamakwe, Eastern Cape, in June 2023. To mark the completion of a new Science TLC and Computer TLC there, AK NPC and the Eastern Cape Department of Education (ECDoE) ran a three-day inquiry-based science training programme for teachers from surrounding schools. Thirty teachers from 15 schools made the journey, many navigating hills, gravel roads and flooded stretches, some driving more than an hour each way. Every one of them attended all three days.

"It was not about a building, a programme, or an organisation," Hartley says of the moment. "It was about teachers who were so committed to improving learning opportunities for their learners that they overcame significant challenges to access professional development."

For Hartley, it remains one of the clearest illustrations of why the work matters: proof that when educators are given a real opportunity, they will go to considerable lengths to take it.

The Science TLCs serve purposes beyond the school day. Each facility functions as a community technology hub, available for digital meetings, departmental training, facility hire and community skills development. Local employment is generated during construction through plumbing, electrical work, security and general labour. Schools gain an income stream from facility hire. Communities gain WiFi infrastructure that supports job applications, small business training and online engagement.

Prof Hartley brings to this work a career spanning decades of science education research and advocacy. His PhD was awarded in 2002 by Curtin University in Perth, following earlier qualifications from the University of the Western Cape (UWC), the University of Cape Town (UCT) and University of South Africa (UNISA). He previously served as Director of the Science Learning Centre for Africa at the UWC (2009-2019) and Director of Research at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) (2004-2009). He now holds an adjunct professorship at Walter Sisulu University (WSU). In 2009, he received the NSTF Communication Award, recognising his work over a five-year period promoting science and technology careers in schools across the Breede River-Overberg region. In 2017, he received both the Chancellor's Outstanding Alumnus Award and the Academic Special Award from the UWC, while his conference papers won Best Paper awards in 2014, 2016, 2017 and 2018.

The vision ahead is ambitious but grounded. AK NPC plans to expand the Science TLC footprint into the Eastern Cape, the Northern Cape and other provinces, with a strategic target of building a minimum of 25 centres each year where sustainable partnerships can be secured. The long-term objective is straightforward: a critical mass of STEM-capable South African learners, prepared for university and for the knowledge economy, who first discovered that science was for them in a laboratory that proved it.

The story behind every achievement

Lifetime Award

Thirty years of changing the conversation on violence against women

Special Annual Theme Award: Healthy Ageing

Thirty years in one village and what it taught the world

TW Kambule-NSTF Researcher Award

Nature’s quantum blueprint

Reading the earth from the inside out

The data she collects could change the course of an epidemic

The guardian of invisible systems

Management Award

The supply chain scientist who counts what matters

Engineering Research Capacity Development Award

Training the engineers Africa needs

NSTF-Water Research Commission (WRC) Award

What is really in the water?

NSTF-SAMRC Clinician-Scientist Award

Seeing the brain through the eyes

NSTF-TIA Green Economy Award

Counting what truly counts

Science Diplomacy for Africa Award

Africa’s nano-ambassador to the world

NSTF–Agricultural Research Council (ARC) Award

A garden that changes everything

Research Software Award

A window on the universe

NSTF-SADiLaR Research Software Award: Human Language Technologies (HLT)

Building the words South Africa was missing online

Data for Research Award

South Africa’s most important health check, for nature

Innovation Award: Corporate Organisation

Hydrogen, atom by atom

Innovation Award: Small, Medium and Micro Enterprise (SMME)

Breathing easier, thanks to AI

Communication Award

The man who makes science irresistible

Non-Governmental Organisation Award

Building laboratories where there were none