Alumnus to participate in (GIL) Africa Summit (Published August 2017)
Hiten Parmar, Director of the uYilo eMobility Technology Innovation
Programme (EMTIP), has been invited to participate in the Frost & Sullivan’s2017 Growth, Innovation and Leadership (GIL) Africa Summit. Hiten, along with Craig Parker who is Frost & Sullivan’s Programme Manager for Automotive & Transportation: Africa, will facilitate the Mobility Workshop at this prestigious event.
He will join Frost & Sullivan’s global community of senior executives on the next phase of the Journey to Visionary Innovation, “Digital Transformation – Business & Social Impact at this year’s summit.
The uYilo Programme was established in 2013 as a national programme towards stimulating and intensifying electric mobility technologies in South Africa and is hosted by Nelson Mandela University’s engagement institute and engineering innovation hub, eNtsa on North Campus.
Professor recieves prestigious award (Published August 2017) 
Nelson Mandela University Honorary Professor, Nancy Refilwe Phaswana-Mafuya, was awarded the 2016/2017 TW Kambule-NSTF Prestigious Award recently by the Minister of Science and Technology. The award was made in recognition of her contribution to research and its outputs over a period of 15 years after the awarding of her PhD.
Prof Phaswana-Mafuya is the Acting Executive Director of the HSRC’s HIV/AIDS/STI/TB Research Programme and is a nationally and internationally recognised scientist with an outstanding scientific track record in HIV/AIDS and chronic non communicable diseases epidemiology, among others.
She was the only black female awardee at the 2016/2017 NSTF awards
International poster award winner (Published August 2017)
Ettienne Minnaar (right) for winning the best poster award (twice!)
at the recent meeting of the Microscopy Society of America, Microscopy & Microanalysis 2017, held in St Louis, Missouri.
Ettienne is a final year PhD student at the Centre for HRTEM, working in the field of polycrystalline diamond for oil drilling applications in collaboration with Element Six in the UK. His invited poster entitled “Microstructural Characterisation of Polycrystalline Diamond Sintered at Ultrahigh Pressures” took first prize at the pre-conference “Congress for Students and Early-Career Professionals in Microscopy and Microanalysis” held on 5 August. Ettienne also received the Microscopy Society of America Student Poster Award on 8 August.
In the photo: Ettienne with Dr Nester Zaluzec from Argonne National Laboratory in the USA. Dr Zaluzec is a renowned physicist, best known as the inventor of the Scanning Confocal Electron Microscope. Dr Zaluzec is a friend of the Centre for HRTEM, and had invited Ettienne to attend Microscopy & Microanalysis 2017.
Graduates to represent the university (Published August 2017)
Qhamani Sinefu (left), senior Law Student and Centre for the Advancement of Non-Racialism & Democracy (CANRAD) Intern and Buntu Mnyaka, Honours student in Development Studies and Chairperson of the United Nations Association of South Africa’s (UNA-SA) Nelson Mandela University Chapter who have been invited to participate in the 6th Africa Students and Youth Summit taking place in Ghana later this week.
The theme of the conference is "A Holistic Approach to Quality Assurance in African Higher Educational Institutions - Pragmatic Interventions by the Supply and Demand Actors". The relevance of this year's Summit is hinged on recent trends that suggest that the issues of access, equity, relevance, comparability and cost of Higher Education are becoming the key talking points at high level dialogues and acknowledged now as having the impetus to drive national development.