Emer Prof Kit Vaughan will receive the UCT Book Award at this week's graduation for his work Imagining the Elephant: A Biography of Allan MacLeod Cormack.

At this week's graduation, Kit Vaughan, emeritus professor of biomedical engineering and director of UCT spin-off company CapeRay, will receive the UCT Book Award for 2010 for Imagining the Elephant: a Biography of Allan Macleod Cormack, his tribute to the South African-born Nobel laureate.

A physicist, Cormack was co-winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his computer-assisted tomography (CAT) scanner. His work also inspired a new generation of medical scientists - including Vaughan, who established a medical imaging research group at UCT in 2000, just two years after Cormack's death, in the latter's honour.

The UCT Book Award carries with it a purse of R30 000, which Vaughan will donate to the Allan Cormack Book Fund, established by Cormack's family to enable science students from disadvantaged backgrounds to purchase text books.