Page 108 - University of Pretoria RESEARCH REVIEW 2016

RECOGNITION
ANDRIES P ENGELBRECHT
Professor Engelbrecht’s research interests include swarm intelligence, evolutionary computation, neural networks, artificial immune systems, and the application of these paradigms to data mining, games, bioinformatics, finance, and difficult optimisation problems. His research team has developed an open source library of computational intelligence algorithms, which is used internationally.
They were the first to provide convergence proofs of particle swarm optimisers (PSO), and they have developed PSO and differential evolution algorithms to cluster non-stationary data. They have also developed new measures to characterise fitness landscapes of continuous-valued optimisation problems.
Professor Andries Engelbrecht is Head of the Department Computer Science in the Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology, and holds the DST-NRF SARChI Chair in Artificial Intelligence.
ROBERT P MILLAR
Professor Millar’s work has made major impacts in areas of
human reproduction, hormone replacement and the treatment of disease such as cancer. His most recent research focuses on the breakthrough discovery that function can be restored to inactivating mutations in human G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), which are responsible for most cell communication. This discovery unlocks the possibility for precision, personalised pharmaceuticals with the potential to treat a variety of diseases including blindness, obesity,
diabetes, and thyroid, muscle, kidney, reproductive and mental health conditions.
Professor Millar received the Platinum Scientific Achievement Award by the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) in 2016, and the John FW Herschel Medal in recognition of his highly distinguished multidisciplinary contributions to science. He was elected as President of the International Neuroendocrinology Federation (INF).
Professor Robert Millar is Director of the Centre for Neuroendocrinology in the Faculty of Health Sciences.
STELLA NKOMO
Professor Nkomo’s research focus is on race and gender and managing diversity in organisations and her scholarly contributions have helped to shape the discourse internationally. In addition to her scholarship, her greatest satisfaction comes from the supervision
of postgraduate students and assisting young scholars in South Africa and Africa. She has held several national and international leadership positions. As founding President of the Africa Academy of Management (AFAM), she has focused on building a premiere continental association for management scholars in Africa and the diaspora who are committed to management knowledge building
for and about Africa. She serves or served on the editorial board of several international journals, and was recently appointed Senior Editor for the Diversity Management section of the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Business and Management.
In 2016 Professor Nkomo received the Continental Lifetime Achiever Award in the CEO Global Africa’s Most Influential Women in Business and Government Awards; and earlier in the year, received the CEO Lifetime Country Achievement Award in recognition of her leadership excellence in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region.
Professor Stella Nkomo is Deputy Dean for Research and Postgraduate Studies in the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences.
YVES VAN DE PEER
Professor Van de Peer was the first to suggest a correlation between whole genome duplication events in different plant lineages and the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary, caused by the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event that wiped out about 70% of all organisms, including dinosaurs. Although whole genome duplications are usually an evolutionary dead end, research in Professor Van de Peer’s laboratory suggested that, during periods
of environmental upheaval, entire genome duplications can provide organisms with a selective advantage so that polyploids can out- compete their diploid progenitors. The research group of Yves van de Peer is widely recognised for their expertise in gene prediction and genome annotation and comparative and evolutionary genomics, and is involved in several international genome projects.
Professor Yves Van de Peer is part-time Professor at the Genomics Research Institute at UP, and Professor in Bioinformatics and Genome Biology in the Department of Plant Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, Ghent University, and the Department of Plant Systems Biology, VIB.
JOHAN VAN DER VYVER
Professor Van der Vyver is an expert in human rights jurisprudence and the international criminal court, and actively participated in efforts to end apartheid and bring constitutional reform to his native South Africa. He has also served as a fellow in the Human Rights
Program of The Carter Center in Atlanta. His research interests and publications include human rights, public international law, international criminal law, humanitarian law, and a great variety of other subject-matters.
Professor Johan van der Vyver is Extraordinary Professor in the Department of Private Law at UP.
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