The Oppenheimer Memorial Trust has announced that the first winner of its New Frontiers Research Award is University of Cape Town (UCT) physicist, Dr James Keaveney. The trust created the award to help reinvigorate research excellence in South Africa (in 2021/22 the country spent only 0.62% of its GDP on research and development; in comparison, for example, in 2022 Türkiye spent 1.32%, Australia 1.66%, Portugal 1.7%, China 2.43%, Taiwan 3.96%, and South Korea 5.21%). The award has a value of R7.5-million, which will be disbursed over five years. Keaveney is a particle physicist who has spent his career studying the fundamental particles and forces that make up all the matter in the universe. He has done so working with the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (better known as CERN) and its Large Hadron Collider, leading international research teams. While there he developed AI algorithms, and leading-edge detectors.
