Marine science prizes for duo

Cross displicinary: Philile Mbatha (left) and Mayra Pereira may be based in different faculties, but they've harvested the fruits of working together.

It's not often that a humanities student and a science student walk away with prizes from the same conference.

But that's exactly what master's students Philile Mbatha and Mayra Pereira did when they took first and second prizes respectively for their presentations at the 7th biennial Western Indian Ocean Marine Science Association (WIOMSA) Symposium, held in Mombasa, Kenya recently.

Although both pursued their studies in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Science, Mbatha is located in the Faculty of Humanities, and Pereira is in the Faculty of Science. They were supervised by Dr Maria Hauck and Dr Rachel Wynberg of the Environmental Evaluation Unit, as part of a wider project on sharing benefits from the coast.

For her presentation, Mbatha (who graduates with distinction on 14 December) focused on institutional arrangements for benefit sharing in coastal communities involved in fisheries and mining in South Africa. Pereira, who graduates on 16 December, looked at sharing benefits from tourism with coastal communities in Mozambique.