From left: Prof Kobus Wessels (Head: CEMS Office of Graduate Studies and Research), Prof Mamokethi Phakeng (Vice-Principal: Research and Innovation), Prof Elmarie Sadler (Acting Executive Dean: CEMS) & Prof Rafael Mpofu (Acting Deputy Executive Dean: CEMS)
“You should do research for which you can receive national and international recognition,” Prof Mamokethi Phakeng, Vice-Principal: Research and Innovation, challenged CEMS academics recently.
She addressed award winners at the CEMS 2012 research awards function and said they should not wait until they have a doctorate, but start publishing as soon as possible.
“If you do excellent research, people will try to ignore you, but on an international level people will remind them. Excellence is the best deterrent to racism, sexism (or whatever you want to put in that space),” she said. With the number of researchers Unisa has, the university should be number one in the country. We should challenge ourselves. Researchers should do research because it energises, excites and invigorates them, not only because they receive awards for it,” she added.
Prof Elmarie Sadler, Acting Executive Dean of CEMS, congratulated the award winners and said she is proud that the college can celebrate its successes of the year which includes the fact that 19 staff members graduated with master’s degrees and 9 with doctoral degrees during the year.
“We realise we still have a lot to do, but we want to celebrate what has been accomplished. This is CEMS’s effort to support Unisa’s plan of increasing research output per capita by increasing research capacity in the college,” she said.
CEMS aligns itself with Unisa’s 3 goals: to increase the per capita research output, to increase the throughput of master’s and doctoral students, and to increase the number of doctoral degrees by staff members. She asked the members of staff who recently graduated with doctorate degrees to contribute and become supervisors.
During the awards ceremony, CEMS recognised staff who obtained their master’s and doctoral degrees during 2012, staff who received Chancellor’s awards, newly rated NRF researchers, staff members who excelled in tuition and the member of staff who produced the most ODL research outputs during the year.
The Department of Public Administration and the School for Management Sciences received the award for the most outputs per capita, and the School for Accounting Studies received the award for the highest increase in research outputs.
Staff members also received recognition for the supervision of the most master’s and doctoral students, hosting post-doctoral fellows, the highest research output by a developing researcher and by an established researcher.
*Story written by Ilze Crous
