(From left) Ofentse Matlhakola, Shimon Corcos and Dhruti Dheda
NITheCS again hosted a heat of the FameLab science communication competition this year. The 11 participants from South African universities at the heat on 3 and 4 June 2025 competed with excellent short presentations on topics spanning the various NITheCS themes.
FameLab is an initiative of the Cheltenham Festivals and ‘an international competition designed to engage and entertain by challenging young scientists to communicate their science to a public audience in under 3 minutes. Talks are fun and engaging, making science relevant to everyone, without using jargon or formal presentations.’ The South African Agency for Science and Technology Advancement (SAASTA) and Jive Media Africa deliver the FameLab competition in South Africa.
The winner of the NITheCS heat was MSc student Ofentse Matlhakola of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) whose area of study is particle physics. Her research topic was ‘The Dead Cone effect of heavy quarks in high energy particle collisions, a fundamental prediction of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD)’.
Ofentse will compete nationally with winners from other local heats at a date to be announced soon. The national winner will receive a prize of R5 000 and the opportunity to represent South Africa at the FameLab International Final later this year.
Placed second was Dr Shimon Corcos, who was recently awarded his PhD in Mathematics from UKZN and is currently doing postdoctoral research at the University of Messina in Sicily. ‘My research is in Topology, which is the study of properties of geometric objects that are preserved under continuous deformations like stretching, twisting and bending but not cutting or gluing. This means that, to a topologist, a coffee mug is equivalent to a doughnut,’ he quips.
The third-placed participant was Dhruti Dheda, a doctoral student for the degree of PhD in Electrical and Information Engineering at Wits. She says: ‘My PhD research focuses on the multi-objective optimisation of hybrid renewable energy systems (HRES). Technical, economic, environmental, and social objectives are integrated into the design process using metaheuristic algorithms. The optimisation process aims to model the optimal HRES configuration, by finding the optimal number of renewable energy component in the system.’
NITheCS is proud to have hosted a heat featuring these deserving winners, along with all the other excellent participants.