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The academic genealogy that traces its roots from Walter Fletcher to Sim Dlamini as an academic supervisor is a remarkable lineage of intellectual giants who have significantly shaped modern scientific thought.

The NITheCS node meetings have kicked off, with two held in July 2024. Read our newsletter to find out more, or view our calendar of events to see the dates of upcoming node meetings.

‘It was my privilege to present our strategic vision and achievements at our 24 June colloquium, ‘Charting the Future of NITheCS: Progress and Prospects in Research, Training, Engagement, and Africa’.’

This month, find out more about our Associate Dr Ridhwaan Suliman, Senior Researcher at the CSIR and Senior Research Associate at UJ. We also encourage you to attend our events.

I am delighted to announce that 2 April 2024 marked the official birth of NITheCS, a new entity on the South African Science, Technology and Innovation landscape. Many steps have been taken to reach this point.

As part of the full NITheCS programme in March, the celebration of the International Day of Mathematics and the start of the 32nd Chris Engelbrecht Summer School stand out.

One of the largest summer schools in coding and the fundamentals of theoretical and computational science, the CHPC and NITheCS event is taking place across 30 academic institutions.

Registration has opened for the 32nd Chris Engelbrecht Summer School, which will take place at Alpine Heath Resort in the Drakensberg from 31 March – 7 April 2024. Limited funding is available for students.

We are looking forward to a number of events in addition to our own regular colloquia and mini-schools this October. Plus, we are giving away 10 complimentary tickets to AI Expo Africa.

We welcome the announcement that the consortium application bid to host NITheCS was awarded to Stellenbosch University, whose multi-thematic application was spearheaded by Prof Sibusiso Moyo.

August is Women’s Month, and we are delighted to present various events and communications to honour and celebrate the invaluable contributions of women in scientific pursuits and related fields.

The collaboration between the African Research Universities Alliance and the Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities holds great promise for NITheCS, says Francesco Petruccione.

Dr Mesias Alfeus (SU) presented a talk at the 6th Symposium on Quantitative Finance and Risk Analysis in Rethymno, Crete, Greece. He is also the new Node Leader of IC4RS at Stellenbosch University.

The IYBSSD ends in June and NITheCS has two final events: a panel discussion on the basic sciences and a call for essays from the NITheCS community on the importance of the basic sciences.

We celebrated World Quantum Day and hosted the Synergy Summit: High Performance Computing for Sustainable Development in April 2023. The Summit was the opening day of the HPC School.

With the year now fully in its stride, we have been busy with work on important documentation such as our annual report. At the same time, our team has been arranging many events.

Some 700 students are attending the 13th CHPC Coding Summer School & 5th NITheCS Summer School on the Foundations of Theoretical and Computational Science.

If you will be attending the World Science Forum, taking place in Cape Town from 6 to 9 December, come and visit us at the NITheCS stand at the exhibition that forms part of the Forum.

UKZN hosted Nobel Symposium Outreach Seminars delivered by renowned physicists whose work is changing the landscape of scientific research and advancement in various fields.

World class scientists inspired learners at two Durban schools when the University of KwaZulu-Natal hosted the KZN leg of the 183rd Nobel Symposium in Physics Public Outreach programme.

Scientists and musicians agreed at a Nobel in Africa event at UKZN that physics can meet jazz. The magic emerges when boundaries are pushed and improvisation reigns over the rules.

The Nobel in Africa Jazz Session, hosted by the University of KwaZulu-Natal, brought together prominent jazz musicians and top physicists for interaction and dialogue in October 2022.

NITheCS is involved in organising the Physics symposia series of Nobel in Africa – a STIAS initiative in partnership with Stellenbosch University under the auspices of the Nobel Foundation and KVA.

We are deploying Google Workspace for Education to make collaboration easier and to gain further access to Google’s tools and functionality. Plus there are benefits for our Associates and students.

NITheCS pays tribute to the ladies with a Call for Women’s Month Writing Retreat. Following last year’s success, we are arranging this event for the second consecutive year.

As the world opens up for travel again, members of the NITheCS community can once again travel to conferences both locally and abroad. We will also start adopting hybrid modes for some events.

We have leveraged funding, with the efforts of USAF and ETDP SETA, to assist students with historical debt from 2021 to the tune of R4 million. This exercise impacts around 150 students and 12 universities across the country.

We have been busy between the long weekends of the past month. We are also proud and humbled by the quality of the presentations at our colloquiums and mini-schools and the warm comments received from participants afterwards.

We aim to offer an interesting NITheCS diary of activities. All of these are planned to fit the interests of our stakeholders, including our Associates, bursary holders and interns, and our many collaborators at different universities.

Our calendar is also filling up with thought-provoking colloquia and mini-schools. Among others we will be celebrating the International Day of Mathematics (IDM) this Saturday 19 March. The webinar is an online programme for students.

February is our time for annual reports and the NITheCS team has been working to finalise our reports to the National Research Foundation, Department of Science and Innovation and our Annual Report. The latter will be available soon.

We hope that 2022 started well for everyone in our community and are looking forward to a productive year and activities that benefit us all. Next week our Colloquia resume, and we kick off with an exciting talk by Dr Samuel Egieyeh of UWC.