Page 109 - University of Pretoria Research Review 2017

Foreword
Introductory Messages
DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE
PEOPLE AND CONTEXTS
HEALTH AND WELL-BEING
ANDRIES P ENGELBRECHT
Professor Engelbrecht’s research interests include swarm intelligence, evolutionary computation, neural networks, artificial immune systems, machine learning, and the application of these paradigms to data mining, games, bioinformatics, computational finance, data analytics, 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). The research team has developed PSO and differential evolution algorithms to cluster non-stationary data, and very efficient PSO algorithms to solve multi-objective, many-objective, and dynamic multi-objective optimisation problems. A new statistical approach to compare the performance of multi-objective optimisation algorithms has been developed, and new measures to characterise fitness landscapes of continuous-valued optimisation problems.
Professor Engelbrecht is the Director of the Institute for Big Data and Data Science, and holds the DST-NRF SARChI Chair in Artificial Intelligence.
JOSUA P MEYER
Professor Meyer’s research focus is on thermal sciences and fluid flow, and more narrowly on heat exchangers. His heat exchanger work
is at the level of fundamental transitional flow regimes, nanofluids and condensation, and at an applications level, on thermal, solar, wind and nuclear energy. Professor Meyer has received a number of national and international awards for his research: the Thomas Price Award, the Rand Coal Award, the LT Campbell-Pitt Award, the Literati Award, and the Will Stoecker Award. He is a member or fellow of a number of professional institutes and societies, including the Royal Aeronautical Society. He serves on the editorial board of 13 journals and has been the editor of seven journals. At the University of Pretoria he has received six exceptional achiever awards, and also the Exceptional Supervisors Award.
Professor Meyer is Head of the Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering and Chair of the School of Engineering, and leads the Clean Energy Research Group at UP.
ROBERT P MILLAR
Professor Millar’s work has made a major impact 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, 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. Professor Millar is President of the International Neuroendocrinology Federation, and in 2017 received the Platinum Medal of the Medical Research Council and the Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship and Gold Medal. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (Edinburgh), a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa, and a Fellow of the Academy of Science of South Africa. In 2017 he also received the highest award of the African Union, the Kwame Nkrumah Continental Award for excellence in scientific achievement. He is currently Programme Chair of the International Congress of Endocrinology.
Professor 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 premier 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 2017, Professor Nkomo received the Black Management Forum (SA) President’s Award and the International Leadership Association Lifetime Achievement Award.
Professor Nkomo is Strategic Professor in the Department of Human Resource Management, 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 outcompete their diploid progenitors. His research group 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 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.
PLANET AND SUSTAINABILITY
Awards
Lead Researchers
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