As Deputy Director of the Centre for Microbial Ecology and Genomics (CMEG), Dr Thulani Makhalanyane has established several new projects focussing on the microbial ecology of cold desert soils and Southern Ocean habitats, as part of the South African National Antarctic Programme (SANAP).
Dr Makhalanyane is a Young Ambassador for the International Society for Microbial Ecology (ISME), and has spent time at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory under the mentorship of Professor Janet Jansson, the current ISME President and a world-leading microbial ecologist.
For Dr Makhalanyane, 2015 was a prolific publishing year. His apex paper, co-authored with colleagues from CMEG, was a major synthesis of the microbial ecology of hot desert ecosystems, which was published in FEMS Microbiology Reviews, the leading journal of the Federation of European Microbiological Societies.
In 2015 he was one of only two recipients of the TW Kambule-NSTF award for an excellent emerging researcher. “Winning the award was a welcome validation of the importance of our work and our contribution to knowledge generation and capacity development,” he says.
Dr Thulani Makhalanyane alongside a transport vehicle – fondly referred to as Ivan, the Terra Bus – that takes researchers from the airstrip where they land in Hercules helicopters to the Dry Valleys of the Antarctic, about an hour’s drive.
