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4 Research luminaries from UNISA leading the way
4 Research luminaries from UNISA leading the way
PROF. MADIPOANE MASENYA
Madipoane Masenya (Ngwan’a Mphahlele), a professor of Old Testament Studies at Unisa, was the first black female to obtain a doctoral degree in Old Testament studies both locally and in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the first person to approach the Old Testament from a womanhood approach at Unisa.
A B-rated NRF researcher, she is a member of the South African Academy of Science. As a gender-conscious scholar, she has employed her bosadi (womanhood-redefined) approach, as a hermeneutical lens to re-read biblical texts in affirming ways to African people, especially women, thus making a critical mark on African biblical hermeneutics both nationally, continentally and globally.
Given the Eurocentric framework in which Old Testament scholarship was/ is conceived and theorised, her work, which not only focuses on the biblical texts’ socio-historical contexts, literary and ideological approaches, but also on critiquing problematic ideologies both within the texts’ contexts of production and those of the hitherto marginalised persons, makes a needed refreshing addition and contribution to mainstream biblical scholarship which remains basically white, male, heterosexual and reformed.
She has published numerous scientific articles and chapters in specialist books in the area of the Hebrew Bible and gender, especially in African contexts.
Serving as editor of journals, including the Journal of Biblical Literature, she has edited and written books including the following: The Africana Bible: Reading Israel’s Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora (Augsburg- Fortress); authored How Worthy is the Woman of Worth? Rereading Proverbs 31:10-31 in African -South Africa (Peter Lang) and co-edited with K.N. Ngwa a volume titled Navigating African Biblical Hermeneutics: Trends and Themes from our Pots and our Calabashes (Cambridge Scholars). As an authority in the discipline, she has been asked, and continues to be asked, to endorse specialist books.
In 2021, Prof. Madipoane Masenya was seconded to act as Executive Director in the Office of the Principal and Vice- Chancellor at the University of South Africa.
DR. ANISHA JOGI
Dr. Anisha Jogi, Unisa PhD graduate and staff member, recently completed one of the first legal theses in South Africa on the regulation of AI in the healthcare sector.
This is one of the main conclusions drawn by her PhD research, which one of her overseas examiners has praised as “world class”, entailed an in-depth exploration of the ethical and legal challenges of AI in healthcare, including a comparative analysis of liability for injury or damage arising from AI systems in the United Kingdom and United States.
Dr. Jogi, who works at Unisa Legal Services, says the expectation is that AI will have a more positive benefit than a negative impact for society, and that drawing attention to the possible risks of AI in healthcare should not be misconstrued as “anti-innovative”. “Rather, it is essential to have due regard to risks so as to ensure that novel technologies like AI, are developed and operated based on an appropriate AI governance regime that secures the trust of individual users and serves the public interest with emphasis on the safeguarding of a human-centric culture.”
While the ultimate objective of AI is to benefit humanity, she says, it must be designed so that it is not mutually destructive with the primary goals of humans.
A “huge issue” in South Africa is that the current liability frameworks for negligence seem to hold the human actors responsible, comments Dr. Jogi. “However, as the technology becomes more sophisticated and can be classified as strong AI (capable of exceeding humans at almost every intellectual task), the autonomy of the technology will become more prevalent.” The more autonomous technology becomes, the more challenging it becomes to decide who is legally accountable if something goes wrong.
“As technology becomes more developed in performing human ‘intelligent’ tasks, the line between operator and instrument begins to blur,” says Dr. Jogi. “Who or what should be held accountable when injury or harm arises due to AI? Should the blame lie with the developer, producer, data supplier, the health institution that procured and implemented the AI system, or the healthcare professional who use and rely on it?”
The country’s current legal regime may not be adequate to deal with medical claims for negligence arising from the use of AI, she says. South Africa also appears to be lagging behind in developing a proper framework for approving and regulating autonomous and adaptive AI-based medical devices. She goes on to make a range of recommendations to address these and other legal and ethical issues concerning AI in healthcare, including to:
• Create a legal basis for conferring “legal personhood” on AI systems, making these systems capable of being sued in court. In this way, the burden of liability would lie with the AI system, and those involved in the supply value chain would not be subjected to lawsuits for negligence (unless they had failed to make provision for AI insurance or other financial mechanisms, or if the court decided to “pierce the corporate AI veil”).
• Establish an AI insurance regime as a mandatory requirement for specific AI offerings, covering losses arising from unintentional errors.
• Develop specialised AI courts comprising judges who are knowledgeable and conversant of the AI field.
• Appoint an AI ombudsperson to investigate complaints on AI matters.
• Consider developing auditing functions for AI systems to detect and recognise undesirable outcomes.
• Through new legislation, establish an independent agency to safeguard the public interest by implementing a certification process for AI systems commercially traded on the open market. In the case of AI medical devices, such an agency would make recommendations on safety to the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (SAHPRA).
• Develop an AI Corporate Governance Code of Best Practices focusing on accountability and ethical leadership in AI.
• Develop an African-focused observatory initiative to monitor and report on advances in AI across various sectors, including healthcare.
• Create financial incentives to encourage the design and deployment of AI systems that are aligned with set ethical and regulatory objectives.
“AI has the ability to revolutionise medical science and offers many prospects for healthcare, from limiting onerous functions in administration to enhancing the precision of diagnosis and improving patient care management to accelerating drug production and distribution,” Dr. Jogi says.
That said, those who deploy and stand to profit from AI in the provision of healthcare services must be accountable for their adverse risks and consequences.
Says Dr. Jogi: “With the recommendations offered here, a case is made for an inclusive and harmonised approach of imperative policy adoption and technological transformation, which is believed will underwrite the benefits, and mitigate risks resulting from AI deployed in the healthcare industry, for the benefit of all people, and more particularly for the most vulnerable populations in South Africa.”
PROF. EDITH DINONG PHASWANA
Prof. Edith Dinong Phaswana is an associate professor and director of graduate programmes at the newly established Thabo Mbeki African School of Public and International Affairs at Unisa.
She boasts an extensive international experience having received specialist training in countries such as The UK, The US, Brazil and China. She has successfully supervised over 59 postgraduate students in Development Studies at various universities in South Africa. As academic director responsible for teaching and learning at the TM-School, she brings in a wealth of experience of over 30 years having taught both in South Africa and the UK. Prof. Phaswana is responsible for strategy, planning, and coordination of the school’s teaching and learning portfolio. She oversees course development, programme delivery, quality assurance, accreditation, and research at the TM-School. “As someone who loves ideas and teaching, an academic career came in handy for me. Exposing young and emerging scholars to a rich African archive to advance knowledge is my passion. Hence, I dedicated my life to teaching and training young scholars in research”.
Prof. Phaswana is a multi-awardee educator and leader in South Africa’s education system. She has received several prestigious awards in her academic career that includes the National Institute for the Humanities & Social Sciences’ best edited volume in the non-fiction category (2020); The Mail and Guardian top 100 women changing South Africa in the education category (2019), and the UJ Humanities Distinguished Teaching Excellence in the senior undergraduate category (2014).
As a leader in education she has also featured as one of the top women elevating SA’s education systems by Public Sector Leaders Magazine (2021, August issue) and the Standard Bank Top Women Leaders Magazine (16th Edition).
Prof. Phaswana’s research interests include leadership and transformation, specifically women leadership and representation in decision making structures within the higher education sector.
She has also published scholarly papers on African development, youth leadership and development policy in internationally accredited journals. She also serves as a member of the editorial board and reviewer for several international journals. Prof. Phaswana has presented over 40 conference papers at national and international platforms.
She has dedicated her research work in education and transformation within the higher education sector in South Africa specifically in women leadership and representation in decision making structures. In her own words: “When women find themselves occupying those lonely seats at the table as is usually the case in many spaces they must ensure that the terms of conversation change. Their presence even if outnumbered must make it difficult for certain things to be said or done.”
Prof. Phaswana is an institution builder and contributed to the establishment of various academic formations in South Africa. Currently, she forms part of the team that established the new Thabo Mbeki African School of Public and International Affairs. Previously, she served the academic community as the founding Vice President of the South African Development Studies Association - she was the first and only female to be elected president since the formation of SADSA in 2013.
She was also one of the founding resource persons in the establishment of the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences in South Africa since its inception in 2013. At the formation of the Young African Leadership Institute (YALI) in Southern Africa, Prof. Phaswana became one of the founding lecturers for this prestigious programme. She also served as one of the instructors for the Diversity and Democracy Institute which was a partnership between The New School Graduate College (New York), University of Witwatersrand and University of Johannesburg. She was one of the pioneers that developed curriculum and taught the Leadership programme for the Mandela Institute for Development Studies.
She currently serves as the international expert for the International Accreditation Council (IAC) of the European Association of Development Studies Institute – the highest association of Development Studies in Europe. She also served as the chair of the IAC review committee in 2021. She participates in several think tank groups’ projects on the African continent. Prof Phaswana continues to provide leadership, research advisory and consultancy services in various organisations and the government of South Africa.
As an engaged scholar she regularly gives commentary on women leadership and education in local tv, radio stations and print media.
PROF. KERSTIN JORDAAN
As a B3 NRF rated academic, Professor Kerstin Jordaan is one of only three B-rated female mathematicians in South Africa. She is also only the fifth female in her field to have been rated in this category since the inception of the NRF ratings in 1984.
She is a full professor in the Department of Decision Sciences, Unisa where she conducts research in mathematics, supervises postgraduate students and researchers in mathematics at the national and international level and teaches undergraduate and postgraduate modules in financial engineering, financial mathematics, and financial risk management to students in Commerce and Operations Research.
“My research interests are properties of special functions and orthogonal polynomials, in particular properties of the zeros, structure relations satisfied by the polynomials and their derivatives as well as asymptotics of the polynomials and their zeros,” Jordaan says.
Special functions play a significant role in mathematical physics, other branches of mathematics, physics, engineering, and other sciences. Classical orthogonal polynomials (OP) constitute an important class of special functions and have various well-known properties and applications. Their study has a long and rich history and continues to be an active research area. A deep exploration and understanding of the existing properties of OPs, together with a search for new properties, is crucial to enhancing their usefulness in theoretical and practical problems. This is the line of research that Jordaan has been pursuing since obtaining her PhD. In recent years, her research interests have developed to also include nonclassical and non-standard situations such as semi-classical OPs.
“This journey has been rewarding, and I have obtained new properties of orthogonal polynomials, solved some open problems and opened new research directions. I have published more than 35 research papers in peerreviewed ISI accredited international journals since 2003, including 17 papers (2013-2020). My work has received a total of 269 citations yielding a WoS h-index of 10.
“According to MathSciNet, 153 authors have cited my publications 243 times. The Google Scholar database lists 529 citations of which 299 are since 2017 and my Google Scholar h-index is 14 with i10-index of 24,” Prof. Jordaan says.
Prof. Jordaan served the academic community as the elected president of the South African Mathematical Society from 2016 to 2019. This is arguably the highest-ranking position in South African mathematics. Apart from overseeing and leading the usual activities of this learned society, she initiated several new projects, for example, the BRICS Mathematical Sciences Conferences from 2017-2020.
She has served on the Steering Committee of the National Research Foundation (NRF) Centre of Excellence in Mathematical and Statistical Sciences, and since 2020, on the Advisory Committee of the NRF National Graduate Committee. Jordaan has been a member of the NRF rating specialist committee for Mathematical Sciences since 2017 and convened this committee in 2020. She has been an Associate Research Fellow of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, since 2015.
Prof. Jordaan is the recipient of several international scholarly awards for her research: A Royal Society Newton Advanced Fellowship (2018-2021); a by-invitation-only award to present in a programme: Complex Analysis Toolbox at the Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge (2019); an award to participate in a research programme at the ICMS in Edinburgh (2019); London Mathematical Society Research awards (2015 and 2012); Academic Staff exchange scholarship SAPIENT (2012). She regularly receives invitations and funding to present at by-invitation only workshops, such as at the Banff International Research Station, Mexico (2018), Canada (2020), the Summer Research Institute, Tianjin (2018) and the Liu Bie Ju Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Hong Kong (2017).
“I am extremely grateful for the recognition from the NRF and my peers, internationally and nationally, for the quality and impact of my research. The rating is an important confirmation that the research is perceived as valuable and that it contributes to the understanding of certain aspects of mathematics and applications thereof,” Jordaan says.
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