Princeton honours UCT scholar

A two-day symposium in honour of Professor George Philander, an internationally renowned scholar with strong ties to UCT, took place at Princeton University in the US on 7 and 8 September. Philander, a UCT graduate and a professor of geophysics at Princeton, is highly regarded for his contribution to the understanding of the El Niño and La Niña phenoma.

He is responsible for naming the latter. He also held a national chair in UCT's Department of Oceanography and initiated the Applied Centre for Climate and Earth Systems Science (ACCESS), which is now a Department of Science and Technology/National Research Foundation centre of excellence. According to ACCESS operations manager, Dr Neville Sweijd, the symposium, dubbed Philanderfest, attracted some 200 scientists from different parts of the globe.

"Some of the best minds in the field gathered to examine the role of the ocean in linking climate across time and space," he reports.