College of Fellows awardees 2025

Dear colleagues and students

Induction into the College of Fellows is one of the highest accolades bestowed on academics at the University of Cape Town (UCT). It acknowledges the scholar’s dedication and contributions that expand the frontiers of knowledge in their field.

The individuals are nominated for the prestigious fellowship based on their significant contributions to research in their respective fields. The honour symbolises UCT’s steadfast commitment to excellence, innovation and impact.

As Albert Szent-Györgyi once put it: "Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought". This award reflects that belief, recognising academics whose work demonstrates originality, critical thinking and impact.

This year, I am delighted to introduce to you our three College of Fellows for 2025 as part of our annual recognition of original, distinguished academic work that merits special acknowledgement.

The three awardees are: 

Professor Jeff Murugan, Department of Mathematics & Applied Mathematics

Professor Murugan is a globally recognised theoretical and mathematical physics scholar whose original, sustained and transformative contributions span foundational research, quantum technologies, mentorship and scientific citizenship. His scholarly achievements have been instrumental in shaping the interface of quantum field theory and quantum information, while also advancing national and institutional priorities in research and innovation.

Among his landmark contributions is the co-discovery of the web of dualities in three-dimensional quantum field theories, which has reshaped our understanding of equivalence between diverse physical theories and has become foundational in the study of emergent phenomena in quantum materials. He is also a co-author of the Murugan-Stanford-Witten model, a class of solvable disordered conformal field theories central to current work on quantum chaos, scrambling and black hole information theory. The name of this model signals an exceptional level of recognition in a field where such attribution is rare.

In recent years, Professor Murugan has pioneered quantum battery theory, constructing models that explore energy storage and transfer at the quantum level – an area with profound implications for future quantum technologies. His work in quantum complexity has defined new metrics for computational and physical complexity in disordered and chaotic systems, impacting both theoretical foundations and applications in quantum computation.

Professor Jaco Barnard-Naudé, Director: Research (Faculty of Law)

Professor Barnard-Naudé is an embodiment of a scholar of great distinction, an academic whose uniqueness in pursuit of exacting knowledge and singular South African trajectory is at the heart of the ethos of the College. He made it explicit that the end of apartheid meant that law can and should be the primary technology of power with which to promote the cause of the historically and presently downtrodden. His doctoral thesis broke new ground, fostering a critical legal argument for contractual justice in the South African law of contract. Thus, he established himself as a young pioneer in critical legal theory, later called ‘critical jurisprudence’. Having chosen UCT as his place of employment, he rose at a steady pace, marked by signal and unique contributions to his field, from lecturer in law in January 2004 to professor of jurisprudence in 2012. He assumed the co-directorship of the Centre for Rhetoric Studies (CRhS) in 2017 when the centre was incorporated into the Department of Private Law. In 2006, he was awarded the Young Fellows Award.

Over the last 21 years, his scholarship has been characterised by a highly interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary synthesis underpinned by hybridisation of the British / Continental and Anglo-American approaches to critical legal theory, whilst contributing to the development of a distinctly South African post-apartheid jurisprudence. Foremost evidence of his stature is seen in his B1 rating by the National Research Foundation in 2024, after a B2 in the wake of a Y1, which was only one of two across UCT among scholars under 40 years of age. Another signal of his intellectual recognition came with the award of a British Academy Newton Advanced Fellowship, held from 2017 to 2020, spent at the University of Westminster’s prestigious Law & Theory Lab. This led to the international publication of the first edited collection devoted to the law’s responsibility for the achievement of spatial justice after apartheid.

Corollary evidence of the societal pertinence and juristic impact of his scholarship is to be found in his work on sexual minority freedom in South Africa (jointly with Professor Pierre de Vos) which formed the basis of a parliamentary submission when adopting the Civil Union Act. It was later credited by the Minister of Home Affairs as having been decisive in the formal drafting of the Act, with provisions recognising same-sex marriage that placed South African democracy at the forefront of civil rights worldwide. This is the hallmark of a jurist engaged at the critical edge of the law.

Professor Andy Buffler, Department of Physics

Professor Buffler is an applied nuclear physicist with internationally recognised expertise in the fields of radiation metrology with a particular focus on fast neutrons. His PhD from UCT, awarded in 1998, developed innovative methods of interrogation of materials in bulk, using fast neutrons with specific applications to threat aversion in the airline industry. Since then, he has pioneered and built a substantial and demonstrable research domain defined by the development, metrology and characterisation of instruments and facilities to investigate fast and high-energy neutrons. Along the way, his research has been acknowledged by multiple organisations.

On a technical, physics-engineering mode, much of his recent research has focused on developing and pioneering the use of organic scintillators in novel compact devices for neutron detection. The two main application areas are the neutron radiation exposed to at flight altitudes and in space, and in and around man-made accelerator facilities such as those used for proton therapy. In both cases there are urgent demands for real-time monitoring with lightweight instrumentation that has traceability to international reference standards.

Professor Buffler constructed the only university-based accelerator facility producing energetic neutrons in southern Africa - the “n-lab” - housed in the Department of Physics which underpins most of the neutron-related R&D within MeASURe. In 2010, he was also central in establishing a positron emission particle tracking laboratory, “PEPT Cape Town”, only the second of its type in the world, and which features what is still the most sensitive PET scanner ever constructed by Siemens. This scanner has been adapted to image flows within industrial systems, for example, tumbling mills and froth flotation tanks in the minerals industry. These are further examples of how Professor Buffler seeks real-world applications of radiation physics; and has contributed to the development of those applications from scratch.

In 2024, he co-proposed and was appointed chair of the UCT Proton Therapy Initiative, which has as its primary goal the establishment of a proton therapy centre in Cape Town. When brought to fruition, this would be only the third such facility in the southern hemisphere, and which would not only ensure new and ground-breaking treatments of cancers, particularly among children, that are at present unavailable in the sub-continent but also provide new avenues for basic research.

We are also pleased to announce the three College of Fellows’ Young Researcher Award recipients for 2025.

Dr Simon Mendelsohn, Department of Pathology

His research focusses on developing and validating novel tools for diagnosing persistent mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tb) infection, incipient and asymptomatic tuberculosis (TB) disease, monitoring response to TB treatment, and biomarker-guided TB preventive and curative therapy. He is part of the South African Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative.

Professor Malebogo Ngoepe, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Professor Ngoepe is a mechanical engineer interested in the role of mechanics in health and disease. Her computational work focuses on thrombosis modelling, myocardial infarction therapies and congenital heart disease. Her work in biomechanics covers topics in blood clotting, children’s heart disease and curly hair. She is the director of the Centre for Research in Computational and Applied Mechanics.

Dr Emily Garman, Department of Psychiatry

Dr Garman is a senior researcher at the Alan J Flisher Centre for Public Mental Health. Her main research interest is the integration of mental health care into community and primary care settings for vulnerable populations in low- and middle-income countries, including adolescents and perinatal women. She is currently the scientific coordinator of the ALIVE project, which aims to develop an intervention that addresses poverty and strengthens self-regulation to prevent depression and anxiety among young people living in poor urban settings in Nepal, Colombia and South Africa.

Please join me in celebrating the remarkable achievements of our colleagues as they attain an important milestone in their careers.

Sincerely

Professor Mosa Moshabela
Vice-Chancellor

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