From the Vice-Chancellor
UCT Inaugural Lecture: Professor Rudzani Muloiwa
11 July 2024 | Emeritus Professor Daya Reddy
Dear colleagues and students
I write to invite you to the next University of Cape Town (UCT) Inaugural Lecture, which will be presented by Professor Rudzani Muloiwa. This lecture marks the seventh instalment in this year’s series.
The lecture is titled "Human One, can these bones live? – Thirsting for the well-being of the Afrikan child in a world of becoming”.
The inaugural lectures are a central part of academic life and provide a platform for recently appointed professors to share insights into their activities and achievements. They also provide the university with an opportunity to showcase our academics and share our research with members of the wider university community and the general public in an accessible way.
Professor Muloiwa is the head of the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health at UCT and Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital. He is also the co-director of the Vaccines for Africa Initiative (VACFA), which is located in the Faculty of Health Sciences.
Countries in Africa have some of the worst child well-being indicators in the world. If this situation is allowed to persist, the foreseeable future of the continent is bleak indeed. Does it matter? In his lecture, Professor Muloiwa suggests that perhaps it should. Taking a critical systems heuristics approach, the lecture proposes an imperative for cultivating courageous ways of seeing; ways that carry hope for creating contextually appropriate communal responses to the challenges of envisioning and creating an African future in which children can live and thrive.
Professor Muloiwa has an interest in the epidemiology of infectious diseases with an emphasis on those that are vaccine preventable, a topic on which his doctoral work was based. He serves as a member of the South African National Immunisation Technical Advisory Group (NAGI) – and the Regional Immunisation Technical Advisory Group (RITAG) for the World Health Organization’s region for Africa. What keeps him awake at night is the issue of equitable access to what would make it possible for children in Africa to live life to the full.
Your presence at this lecture would be greatly appreciated.
Date: Thursday, 25 July 2024
Time: 17:30 SAST
Venue: Neuroscience Institute Auditorium, Groote Schuur Hospital
Sincerely
Emeritus Professor Daya Reddy
Vice-Chancellor interim
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The UCT Inaugural Lecture Series
Inaugural lectures are a central part of university academic life. These events are held to commemorate the inaugural lecturer’s appointment to full professorship. They provide a platform for the academic to present the body of research that they have been focusing on during their career, while also giving UCT the opportunity to showcase its academics and share its research with members of the wider university community and the general public in an accessible way.
In April 2023, Interim Vice-Chancellor Emeritus Professor Daya Reddy announced that the Vice-Chancellor’s Inaugural Lecture Series would be held in abeyance in the coming months, to accommodate a resumption of inaugural lectures under a reconfigured UCT Inaugural Lecture Series – where the UCT extended executive has resolved that for the foreseeable future, all inaugural lectures will be resumed at faculty level.
Recent executive communications
2024
Professor Susan Cleary delivered her inaugural lecture on 14 March.
14 Mar 2024 - 5 min read
2023
Prof Lydia Cairncross’s inaugural lecture provided a snapshot of the career path of a surgeon and community activist whose commitment to social justice means her work doesn’t end in the operating theatre.
02 Nov 2023 - 8 min read
2022
Professor Linda Ronnie is in UCT’s Faculty of Commerce.
28 Sep 2022 - 6 min read
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2021
2020
2019
2018
2017
2016 and 2015
No inaugural lectures took place during 2015 and 2016.