Lectures 2023

In the construction field, procurement is the process that creates, manages, and fulfils contracts for infrastructure projects. Despite the proliferation of procurement and project management guidelines and models, the construction field has failed to master procurement effectively enough to consistently achieve a project's intended outcomes.

The history of the management of construction and civil engineering projects, from ancient structures like the Roman aqueducts, to modern buildings like the Leonardo in Sandton, South Africa, shows little progress in consistent and efficient infrastructure procurement and project outcomes. It also shows little progress in the development, teaching, and application of a consistent and effective management approach to produce expected procurement outcomes.

The three focus areas of this lecture were procurement outcomes in construction, insights from research and projects on the relationship between construction procurement and outcomes, and a view on future pathways to achieve better infrastructure procurement outcomes.

Viruses are notoriously changeable, mutating their coat proteins to become invisible to antibodies. The immune system is as variable, with randomly joined strings of genes and mutations creating a myriad of ways in which antibodies can target viruses. Penny Moore has spent 20 years studying the “arms race” between HIV and antibodies, to gain insight into how to make an HIV vaccine. These lessons proved pivotal as COVID-19 emerged, and SARS CoV-2 variants of concern challenged the ability of our vaccines to prevent infection.

This lecture unveiled a thought-provoking exploration of preventive audiology within the intricate tapestry of South Africa. Centred around the burdens of hearing impairment – encompassing Early Hearing Detection and Intervention (EHDI), ototoxicity, Occupational Noise-Induced Hearing Loss (ONIHL), and middle ear diseases – the lecture intricately weaved together a contextual narrative that challenges conventional wisdom.

At its core, the lecture delved into the art of discernment: "Hear them, but don't listen to them" – a play on words that encapsulates the essence of critically engaging with Euro-American-centric knowledge and its application within the unique South African milieu. It underscored the imperative of contextual relevance, responsiveness, and responsibility when implementing preventive audiology practices.

Through an astute analysis of prevailing practices, current evidence, challenges, and potential solutions, the lecture illuminated the intricate balance between embracing international best practices while honouring the distinct cultural, socio-economic, and regulatory intricacies of South Africa. The exploration of innovative strategies, including tele-audiology, collaborative partnerships, regulatory reforms, and continuous monitoring, beckons a transformative journey towards enhanced preventive audiology.

In this symphony of ideas, Prof Khoza-Shangase resonates with the call to action: a harmonious blend of global knowledge and local wisdom, orchestrating a symphony of preventive audiology that speaks to the heart of South Africa's diverse audiological landscape.

His work involves health systems research that directly translates into national programmes, most recently involving the antiretrovirals, dolutegravir, tenofovir alafenamide, cabotegravir, and doravirine. He leads multiple antiretroviral treatment optimisation studies and is currently working on new access programmes through private pharmacies within South Africa, as well as patient linkage-to-care intervention, and new models of primary care for chronic diseases. He has led large PEPFAR-funded HIV programmes in South Africa, focusing on men, women, children, young people, truckers, sex workers, and LGBTI communities.

For over 20 years he has been an advisor to bodies such as the South African government, UNAIDS, and WHO, contributing to international, regional, and national HIV guidelines. He recently served as a member of the Ministerial Advisory Committee for COVID-19. He has an active interest in medical ethics and has been involved in several HIV-related human rights cases within the southern African region. He supervises a large number of Masters and PhD projects. Recent work has included publications in Lancet HIV, New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, AIDS, and PLOS Medicine.

Public debt is frequently analysed from a purely financial and accounting perspective. This stage of the analysis is valuable as it provides essential information for assessing the situation, especially its sustainability. However, this alone is not sufficient. Firstly, because the macroeconomic trajectory impacts that of public debt, and thus its sustainability, and conversely, public debt can have an impact on a country's overall dynamics.

This is where we cannot bypass the purpose and meaning of public action. The non-financial counterparts of public debt, namely its uses, have a differentiated effect not only on the rest of the economy but also on class relations. This has a feedback effect on sustainability from the perspective of the political and social effects of macroeconomic dynamics, which can either reinforce or undermine the credibility of economic policy (and thus debt sustainability).

In particular, the question of tax acceptance and the distribution of the tax burden among social groups, including its progressivity, plays a crucial role in understanding what can or cannot be done with public debt. This presentation sought to discuss the South African case in comparison to a few other countries.

The current non-communicable disease burden in Africa can be attributed to not only more years spent in older age, but also to the increasing prevalence of obesity and physical inactivity due to rapid urbanisation.

In this lecture Professor Micklesfield discussed her research over the last 18 years (‘a lifecourse from birth to young adulthood’) which addresses four major themes:

(i) Epidemiology of non-communicable diseases in African cohorts;
(ii) Measurement of physical activity and other risk factors for non-communicable diseases;
(iii) Aetiological understanding of the mechanisms of non-communicable diseases; and
(iv) Health messaging and impact.

This talk followed the adventures of a synthetic organic chemist: from the structure elucidation and total synthesis of a unique South African toxin, through the design and synthesis of anti-HIV active heterocyclic compounds, to the use of enzymes for kinetic resolution. In other words: how to solve the “murder mystery” involving sheep dying on their way home, how multi-component reactions can be used to rapidly generate large chemical libraries and how a common detergent additive can be used to obtain only one form of a molecule from various possibilities. Hundreds of new molecules made and still it seems it is only the beginning

Physiotherapy is recognised globally as an essential service for patients admitted to intensive care units due to severe illness. Treatment delivered to patients in ICU involves sedation, mechanical ventilation, antimicrobial therapy, and in some cases surgical interventions. This predisposes many patients to developing impairments in physical and cognitive function resulting in delayed recovery after discharge. Historically there is a scarcity of physiotherapy research expertise in South Africa that focuses on the management of patients with severe illness.

In this lecture, I shared how my research has bridged this gap by defining practice standards for physiotherapy in ICU, investigating the effectiveness of various patient management strategies used for rehabilitation in ICU, and exploring the health-related quality of life outcomes of patients as they recover from critical illness.

As access to antiretroviral therapy has improved, more children with peri-natally acquired HIV are surviving into adulthood. HIV survivorship comes with a number of health and functional challenges which have the potential to impact negatively on children from infancy to adolescence.

Prof. Potterton discussed the evolving landscape of living with HIV as a child growing up in South Africa from a developmental perspective. She highlighted the contribution that her own work, together with her post graduate students, has made to the field over the last twenty years.

Prof. Potterton discussed the challenges that remain and reflect on the barriers to translating knowledge into clinical practice.

Music in human voice does not only convey speech context and facilitate communication. This sound of music carries pertinent information on the speaker’s personality, medical state, and emotions. This lecture explored the application of audio analysis to the diagnosis and monitoring of physiological and mental conditions. The translational aspect of this research is demonstrated through the investigation of voice characteristics for enhancing the education and media sciences.

Clusters of galaxies are the most massive gravitationally bound structures in the universe. A typical cluster is approximately 100 trillion times more massive than our Sun and made up of hundreds of galaxies embedded in an atmosphere of hot (10 million K) gas. They are hostile environments that shut down star formation, leaving clusters in the local universe full of 'red and dead' elliptical galaxies. Collisions between galaxy clusters are the most energetic events that have happened in the universe, after the Big Bang.

In this talk, I described the hunt for galaxy clusters across 10 billion years of cosmic history, what we can learn about their formation and evolution from observations across the electromagnetic spectrum, and how this may help us to understand the properties of the mysterious dark matter and dark energy that make up most of the universe.

Biometeorology involves the study of climate change and its impacts on plants, animals and people. This ranges from understanding the features of synoptic climate systems and rates of climate change, to studying changes in the timing of phenological events such as flowering dates, the influence of weather and climate on human health, and the impacts of climate change on tourism.

This makes biometeorology the perfect topic for those of us who find just about everything about the weather and climate exciting, or the for the little girl who in Grade 0 thought she would grow up to be an ‘everyologist’.

In this talk I shared my passion for climate change science, walking you through my research on biometeorology and the adventures that we have had in the lab and field.

Water research occurs as subordinate to the academic domain within which it is conducted. Consequently, the thinking of water researchers is sometimes framed by the academic background of the researcher. Engineers tend to think like engineers, scientists tend to think like scientists, lawyers tend to think like lawyers, even if these professionals all work in the water sector.

In this lecture I presented an overview of my perspective of water challenges locally and globally. I link this to my research as an engineer and scientist, trying to engage with these challenges and being left with a sense of ‘this could be so much more meaningful’ if humanities are included in the engineering and scientific research. This is what I mean by “Into the Wild”.

Despite improvements in neonatal survival in South Africa, the neonatal mortality rate remains unacceptably high, particularly for a high middle-income country. The four main contributors to neonatal death are preterm birth, infections, perinatal asphyxia, and congenital abnormalities.

In this lecture, Prof. Velaphi outlined global developments over the past three decades that have reduced neonatal morbidity and mortality. He highlighted his own contributions to improving neonatal care in South Africa, and at his own hospital, through research, policy development and programme implementation addressing the major disease burdens. Prof. Velaphi reflected on the ongoing challenges and barriers to adequate neonatal care and discussed how these challenges can be best addressed in resource-constrained settings.

The night sky as we see it represents only a very small fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. Astrophysical sources emit photons of all energies, from the lowest energies in the radio regime up to very-high-energy gomma rays. The field of gomma ray astronomy made huge progress in the last twenty years, and H.E.S.S. is currently one of the most sensitive instruments for these observations. H.E.S.S. has conducted a survey of the Milky Way, revealing more than 70 previously unknown sources of gomma rays.

In this lecture, I have given an introduction to the H.E.S.S. telescopes and have shown the observational results of the Milky Way and its immediate neighbourhood. I have discussed what we can learn from these observations about the nature of the individual sources and concluded with a brief outlook on future instruments and research projects.

Since the dawn of civilisation, the duality of water has been evident. However, in the delivery of municipal services, this duality and its impact on development are mostly under-estimated. On the one hand, water is simple in its composition (H₂0), its transparent appearance and its tasteless and odourless qualities. On the other hand, water is complex in its purpose (“water is life”) and how we harness and interact with it. My lecture articulated 3 decades of peering into some aspects of the eclectic dualistic face of the waters (i.e., supply demand, conservation, and sanitation) and how my peering has and will influence the delivery of municipal water and sanitation services.