Students impress at second SKA Bursary Conference

10 December 2007

By Ms Kim de Boer, Manager: Human Capital Development, Communications and Outreach

About 80 delegates, including 27 postgraduate astronomy and engineering SA SKA bursary holders, attended the 2nd Annual Postgraduate Bursary Conference of South Africa's SKA / MeerKAT project. The conference was held from 26 - 30 November at the South African Astronomical Observatory in Cape Town and was also attended by leading astronomers from Jodrell Bank Observatory, Caltech, Oxford University, Astron and the Universities of Mauritius and Antananarivo.

Networking, information sharing and future collaboration were the key objectives of the event. Local and international scientists and engineers, as well as all 27 students, presented an update on their current work and future plans over four, full days.

"South Africa is the future of radio astronomy", commented Dr Clive Dickinson of Caltech towards the end of the conference, and added that "the work done by the South African students were on par with anywhere else in the world and deserved world recognition."

The students were encouraged and inspired by this feedback from the international visitors who were uniformly impressed with the high quality and relevance of their work. South Africa's success in capacity development in this field is significant, since it emerged from the conference that most countries face similar challenges in terms of attracting young achievers to careers in astronomy.

Professor Mike Jones of Oxford University assured the students that they have earned their membership into the international astronomy community and that they would be welcomed and accepted in this "club" anywhere in the world. He encouraged the students to gain international work experience and then take the expertise back to their home country. "Your work is comparable with that of top students in other countries, and even with the work of professional astronomers," he told the students. Professor Arnold van Ardenne of ASTRON was similarly impressed with the South African students. "Your deliberate and concentrated capacity development is unique in the world, and is clearly working", he told the SKA South Africa team.

As in 2006, the students competed to be recognised for the best presentation. Renee Hlozek, an MSc student at the University of Cape Town (UCT) walked away with the "overall best presentation award" for her talk on the "Detection, classification and parameter estimation of cosmic transients". Six more students also received book vouchers for their excellent presentations. They were Tana Joseph, Jason Salkinder and Andile Mngadi (UCT), Paul van Merwe and Gideon Wiid (Stellenbosch University) and Ryan Warne (University of KwaZulu-Natal).

The conference provided all participants with a big-picture understanding of all the sub-systems of the MeerKAT project, and how these fit together. The importance of effective collaboration between the science and engineering communities working on the MeerKAT and SKA projects in South Africa emerged as an important outcome of the conference.