Black, women scientists' advance hailed
The National Science and Technology Forum Awards has seen an increase in awards for black scientists as well as women.
|||Pretoria - Life Sciences, medicine and engineering are the top three disciplines which come up for nominations for the annual National Science and Technology Forum Awards (NSTFA), a trend that has been maintained for the past four years.
The awards have been given to deserving scientists for 17 of the 20 years of their existence. In addition, scientists in various other fields have been awarded for their work in science and technology.
“The numbers of women have also increased to 34 percent, while 43 percent of our recipients are black,” NSTFA executive director Jansie Niehaus said at the CSIR on Wednesday.
Niehaus said they had had 676 finalists, or an average of 40 a year. “And none of these are duplicated from one year to the other,” she said.
The list of nominations stood at an average of 1 094 every year, 25 percent of them female, she said. “We are reviewing the awards system to gauge their value and see how important they are and if they need to be improved.”
The awards were initiated in 1998 to recognise those who made outstanding contributions to science and technology, and it had improved and grown over the years.
Excellence is awarded in the fields of engineering, research and innovation capacity, building and science communication by the organisers and their sponsors.
Pretoria News
* Use IOL’s Facebook and Twitter pages to comment on our stories. See links below.