University of Cape Town

Professor Farrant is the world’s leading expert on resurrection plants, "which come back to life" from a desiccated, seemingly dead state when they are rehydrated. She investigates the ability of many species of these plants to survive without water for long periods of time – looking at the molecular, biochemical and ultrastructural to the whole-plant ecophysiological. She uses a unique comparative approach and works with many different species of resurrection plants and a variety of tissues.

Professor Janelidze obtained his DSc from the St Petersburg State University in 1992 where he was the first DSc in category theory in the former USSR. Later, he was a visiting professor at a number of institutions in Europe, North America, and Australia. He was appointed as professor at UCT in 2004, and became an honorary member of the A Razmadze Mathematical Institute of the Georgian Academy of Science.

Co-director of the national Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR), Professor Tommie Meyer is also the leader of the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning group at UCT and the director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Unit (AIRU) – CAIR UCT node. Prior to this he held positions at the CSIR in Pretoria, National ICT Australia (now Data61), the University of New South Wales in Australia, the University of Pretoria and the University of South Africa.

Professor Mesthrie is the research chair in the School of African & Gender Studies, Anthropology & Linguistics (AXL). He is a past president of the Linguistics Society of Southern Africa (2001-2009) and a past head of the Linguistics Section at UCT (1998-2009). He was elected honorary life executive member of the Linguistics Society of Southern Africa in 2012. He is currently an executive member of the International Society for English Linguistics and an elected member of the SA Academy of Science.

Professor Ekama has 35 years of research experience into activated sludge systems at UCT. Over the years he has been at the forefront of developments in BNR-activated sludge systems modelling, filamentous bulking, and secondary settling tank design and modelling.

Professor Dheda, head of the Division of Pulmonology at UCT, focuses on the design and evaluation of user-friendly diagnostic tools and interventions for drug-sensitive and -resistant tuberculosis (TB).

Dheda led a multicentric study in four countries involving more than 2 500 patients to evaluate a new user-friendly urine-based diagnostic test (urine LAM). This was the first controlled study to evaluate the benefit of the LAM test in reducing mortality and the findings underpinned the WHO guidelines regarding its global rollout.

Professor Kincaid is director of the Research Unit in Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics (RUBEN). At RUBEN, Kincaid has been involved in studies looking at the prevalence of gambling in South Africa, and at problem gamblers and at-risk gamblers. He is the co-editor of Distributed Cognition and the Will: Individual Volition and Social Context and What Is Addiction?

Professor Muller is recognised as a global authority on kidney and liver transplantation and is a trailblazer in the field of organ transplantation in HIV-positive patients. Currently the head of the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Division of General Surgery, she initiated a Donation after Cardiac Death programme in 2007 and a transplant programme for HIV-positive patients utilising HIV-positive donors at Groote Schuur Hospital in 2008.

Professor Peter Ryan is director of the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, which forms the core of a DST-NRF Centre of Excellence using birds as keys to biodiversity conservation. He completed his MSc and PhD in zoology at UCT. After a short stint teaching at the University of California Davis he returned to UCT in 1993 to coordinate the very successful MSc course in conservation biology.

Professor Mizrahi is the director of both the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine (IDM) and the Molecular Mycobacteriology Research Unit of the South African Medical Research Council, and also head of the UCT node of the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence for Biomedical TB Research. Mizrahi’s research team is internationally recognised for its work on aspects of the physiology and metabolism in Mycobacterium tuberculosis of relevance to TB drug discovery and drug resistance.