Page 7 - DUT Conduit

DR VAHED SELECTED FOR THE FUTURE PROFESSORS PROGRAMME
Pictured: DUT Business School logo. DUT Business School Project Leader Professor Veena Rawjee and DUT’s Executive Dean: Faculty of Management Sciences, Prof Fulufhelo Netswera.
DUT'S NEWLY
ESTABLISHED
BUSINESS
SCHOOL OFFERS
AVARIETYOF
PROGRAMMES
Simangele Zuma
Durban University of Technology’s (DUT’s) newly established Business School, under the ambit of the Faculty of Management Sciences is ready to advance contemporary leadership in southern Africa and beyond. Its curriculum is focused on applied business, which will enable leaders to solve real-life problems that contribute to socio-economic transformation. DUT’s Business School Project Leader Professor Veena Rawjee said the School is currently operational and is temporarily based at the ML Sultan Campus. It offers a variety of academic programmes, executive education courses and short learning programmes.
The following programmes are offered:
• The New Masters of Business Administration (MBA)
programme.
• Postgraduate Diploma in Business Administration (PDBA) programmes.
• Advanced Diploma in Business Administration.
• Higher Certificate programmes.
• A variety of executive education and short learning programmes.
• The School also plans to design tailor-made, in-house programmes and collaborate with corporate, public and non- profit organisations to develop and capacitate employees in various areas.
Prof Rawjee further explained that the School’s academic programmes are accredited by the Council for Higher Education (CHE), registered with the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) and approved by the Department of Higher Education (DHET). In addition, she said the School is a member of the South African Business School Association (SABSA) and the Association of African Schools (AABS).
Prof Rawjee advised those who require a customised course to be developed to contact Dr Sean Jugmohan via email on: seanj@dut.ac.za.
“The Business School will align with the DUT’s ENVISION 2030 strategy, which is to see its people become entrepreneurial and innovative.The programmes will be delivered by well-credentialed, experienced facilitators together with active practitioners in various specialised fields. Our future plans are to locate the school in its own building. Our teaching and learning will follow a blended, online, multimodal format in keeping with DUT’s teaching and learning strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Prof Rawjee.
Lastly, the school has an advisory board that represents, among others, corporate, academia and government, both nationally and internationally. The Board members are well-credentialed leaders in their respective professions and representatives of various sectors.
Applications for the School’s flagship programme, the Master of Business Administration (MBA) are now open and will close next month, on Friday, 30 April 2021. The MBA will commence in July 2021. This is the last chance for those interested to apply.
Apply now by emailing mba@dut.ac.za, log onto www.dut.ac.za or call 031 373 5768/5710/3008.
Waheeda Peters
In December last year, Dr Anisa Vahed was one of two successful participants accepted into the Future Professors Programme (FPP), a competitive and selective programme of the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) to prepare promising early career academics to become a new cohort of South African professors across disciplines.
The other academic was Durban University of Technology’s (DU T’s) Chemistry lecturer Dr Myalowenkosi Sabela.
Pictured: Dr Anisa Vahed
emphasis on black and woman scholars,” said Prof Jansen.
Specifying more on the criteria, he said that applicants should hold a doctorate and already boast a track record of some academic achievement that would signal advancement to the senior ranks of the academy. “The programme includes three core components: a residential series of seminars; a baseline evaluation that will help each scholar understand their standing in the discipline and propose trajectories for future development; and international engagement appropriate to
the scholar’s particular intellectual project,” he said.
Commending her acceptance into the programme via an official email letter was Dr Blade Nzimande, Minister of Higher Education, Science and Innovation. “Congratulations on your well-deserved success and best wishes for an excellent experience as a participant in the programme. I trust you will take full advantage of the opportunity that has been afforded to you and I look forward to the contribution you will make as a leading academic in higher education in South Africa and beyond,” he said.
Dr Vahed indicated that her training began in February this year. She said that in view of the conditions of the pandemic, the delivery of the DHET Future Professors Programme is online and introduces participants to leading global scholars, participation in practicals, workshops and smaller, breakaway sessions specific to scholars in particular disciplines, as well as in cohort building engagements that are scheduled across the year. “Thus far, I have been orientated into the programme, attended coaching sessions and attended a very insightful and thought-provoking keynote speech by Professor Jonathan Jansen on ‘Academic Identity: On becoming a scholar’. There are even more exciting and interesting keynotes, Saturday morning workshops and standalone seminars to look forward to,” she said.
DUT’s Dental Technologist and Researcher: Dr Vahed, is a senior lecturer at the Department of Dental Sciences with more than 20 years’ teaching experience. She is also the recent recipient of the Fulbright South African Research Scholar for the 2020-2021 academic year.
Dr Vahed said: “I feel very fortunate to be part of such a dynamic programme that presents various opportunities to further develop myself professionally and learn from a team of respected and recognised expert facilitators and seasoned researchers/academics.”
The Department of Higher Education and Higher Training is in the second year of implementing the FPP. Dr Vahed was selected into the second cohort of Phase 1 of the FPP.
According to Professor Jonathan Jansen, FPP Project Leader, the call, the second of three in successive years, seeks to identify a group of the country’s most talented young academics to benefit from a structured and intense programme aimed at accelerating their readiness for the professoriate.
“It aims to produce a critical mass of academic excellence and leadership within South African Higher Education. The programme is intended to complement initiatives hosted by both the DHET and individual universities aimed at developing a pipeline of early-career academics with an
DUT PROFESSOR'S COVID-19 WORK
RECOGNISED BY WORLD
HEALTH ORGANIZATION
Simangele Zuma
Durban University of Technology’s Interim Executive Dean: Faculty of Health Sciences Professor Ashley Ross has together with a group of international health experts written a topical paper: Data Collection during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Learning from Experience, Resulting in Bayesian Repertory, which was recently listed on the World Health Organization (WHO) website.
This is a pat on the back for Prof Ross and 13 other homeopathic researchers, epidemiologists and clinicians from USA, UK, Argentina, India, Italy, Belgium, Greece and Turkey for a job well done.
The aim of this study, which was based on Bayes’ Theorem, was to discover the relationship between specific symptoms and specific medicines, especially of symptoms occurring frequently in COVID-19. The research commenced in May 2020 and was led by a very well-regarded Dutch researcher, Dr Lex Rutten. The case collection and analysis was conducted over a period of five months.
The findings were that the Likelihood Ratios (LRs) of common symptoms such as ‘fatigue’ and ‘headache’ provided better differentiation between medicines than did existing repertory entries, which are based on the presence or absence of symptoms. A mini-repertory for COVID-19 was published and supported by a web-based algorithm. With a case of 20 common symptoms, this algorithm produced the same outcome as a full homeopathic analysis based on a larger number of symptoms, including some that are traditionally considered more specific to particular medicines.
“The original paper
was published in the
journal, Homeopathy
(formerly the British
Homoeopathic Journal)
in January 2020. WHO
listed the paper on their
website on 01 February 2021, under the heading: Global Literature on Coronavirus Disease,” Prof Ross said.
Seeing the listing of this paper on the WHO website filled Prof Ross with tremendous excitement. “It is no secret that homoeopathy is very erroneously regarded in some quarters as being ‘unscientific’, so it was indeed both exciting and an honour that our work, which is extremely painstaking and accountable, was recognised as being worthy of dissemination by the WHO,” said Prof Ross.
The COVID-19 paper (and the app that was developed alongside it [https://hpra.co.uk/]) is one of two international collaborations on COVID-19 that Prof Ross is currently engaged in. He is also working on the CLIFICOL project, whch is a much bigger case analysis project, expected to yield a number of papers. This project is using case reports to explore much more fundamental homeopathic concepts, while producing a very detailed record of the homeopathic treatment of COVID-19 across the globe. The project seeks ultimately to analyse 10 000 successful cases and is expected to be published later this year.
Pictured: DUT’s Interim Executive Dean: Faculty of Health Sciences Professor Ashley Ross.
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