In June 2013, UCT’s Pola Pasvolsky Chair in Conservation Biology clinched a prestigious NSTF-BHP Billiton TW Kambule award for his individual contributions to science, through research, over a period of five to 10 years.

Four months later, the Southern Africa Association for the Advancement of Science (S2A3) awarded him the British Association Medal (silver) for 2013. For the past 81 years, the S2A3 medal has been one of the highest awards made to young Southern African scientists for original research, and recognises outstanding capability and achievements in publications, discoveries or special skills.

“It’s nice to have the recognition that what we’re doing is important – and it’s nice to give the work we do some publicity and prominence,” says Professor Cumming.

Although Professor Cumming is based in the Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology (Department of Biological Sciences), birds are only one focus of his broad range of research interests, which span landscape ecology, conservation biology, community ecology, resilience and complex systems theory. Among the programmes he runs is one on water birds and disease, particularly avian influenza and avian malaria (birds are not vectors for human malaria) and potential vectors of human and avian influenza.

Avian flu has hit the ostrich industry hard. H5N2, a highly pathogenic strain, resulted in farmers culling large numbers of birds, particularly after the 2011 outbreak. To monitor this, Professor Cumming has been working with the state veterinarian on the movement of ostriches from farm to farm.

But much of his focus is on ducks as primary vectors of avian influenza. Using telemetry, ducks like Red-billed Teal and Egyptian Geese (which are actually a shelduck, a cross between a goose and a duck) are tagged to document their range and movements.

Professor Reddy, who holds the DST/NRF SARChI Chair in Computational Mechanics in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, was inaugurated as the president of the post late in 2012 and will hold it until 2016.

At ASSAf, he says he hopes to build on ”the very solid foundation established by my predecessors”. That will involve expanding the academy’s international role, tackling substantive issues with kindred academies in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe. Another area he wants to expand is in relation to the academy’s core mandate of providing evidence-based policy advice to government and other institutions, a commission in which Professor Reddy would like to see more ASSAf members involved.

In 2013, Professor Reddy also won the Georg Foster Research Award, worth €60 000, from the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany.

As many black South Africans scientists can attest, the path to academic success is not always a smooth one. No-one knows this better than Associate Professor Ramutsindela. Born to a poor Limpopo family of seven children, he started his schooling at age nine in a mud building. After matriculating, he spent a year working as a full-time teacher assistant to raise money for his university fees. Studying under apartheid conditions when his alma mater (University of the North) was under siege by the South African security forces, Ramutsindela nonetheless managed 11 subject distinctions and went on to complete his honours degree, going abroad to do his PhD at Royal Holloway College of the University of London on a Canon Collins Trust Scholarship.

At UCT, he became one of the first group of social scientists to be awarded an NRF P-rating for young researchers (usually under 40) in 2002, the first black geographer to edit the South African Geographical Journal and the first African to be elected a Fellow of the Society of South African Geographers. His work to transform the field has extended globally. As editorial board member for several leading journals, Associate Professor Ramutsindela is the representative of and voice for Africa on environmental and geographical matters. He has also earned international recognition, including the Distinguished Hubert H Humphrey Visiting Chair at Macalester College in the US.

Professor Bond, an ecologist with an interest in the processes that control large-scale vegetation, joins an elite group of eminent scientists from around the world. The NAS, which celebrated its 150th anniversary last year, is an independent body of approximately 2 200 members and 400 foreign associates. Nearly 200 members of this prestigious body are Nobel laureates.

Professor Bond and his colleagues in South Africa and elsewhere have shown that wildfires are a major force in shaping global vegetation – and have been for many millions of years.

“African vegetation is particularly interesting and challenging to study because of the complex interplay between climate, fire, large mammal herbivores, people, and increasing CO2, the hidden hand of global change,” said the National Research Foundation (NRF) A-rated researcher.

He joins Professor Richard Cowling, a conservation biologist at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, as the only two current South African foreign associates of the NAS. Africa (including Madagascar) has only four foreign associates. This year, Dr Meave Leakey from Kenya was also added as an associate.

Titled “A Return to Strong Radio Flaring by Circinus X-1 Observed with the Karoo Array Telescope Test Array KAT-7”, the paper reports on observations of the neutron star binary Circinus X-1 in December 2011 and January 2012, which caught two successive bright radio flares from this unusual binary system. The project was a joint effort with the HartRAO radio telescope near Johannesburg and KAT-7.

South Africa is constructing MeerKAT, the 64-dish radio interferometer that serves as a precursor to the SKA. UCT researchers are leading four of the approved MeerKAT Key Science Projects, representing a quarter of MeerKAT time. One of these projects is the 3 000-hour ThunderKAT survey for astrophysical transients led by Associate Professor Woudt and Professor Fender, which will search for all types of radio bursts and flashes in KAT-7 and MeerKAT data on timescales from seconds to years.

Associate Professor Woudt obtained his PhD in Astronomy at UCT in 1998 and has published 74 peer-reviewed journal articles (27 as first author). His teaching and research career at UCT spans more than 12 years and includes supervising various BSc honours, MSc and PhD students. A member of the International Astronomical Union, Commission 19 (Astrophysics) of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics and the Council of the South African Institute of Physics, he is the co-principal investigator of ThunderKAT.