Africa's oldest university in continuous operation, set against Devil's Peak, where world-class medicine, cosmology, and drug discovery are done for the continent and from it.
11 professors and academic leaders celebrated so far, cited on every card. A small, growing selection, not a roster of the faculty. In pursuit of every professor, everywhere.
Vice-Chancellor
Office of the Vice-Chancellor
Thank you for bringing a rural doctor's ear to the leadership of Africa's leading university, and for a career spent asking how HIV and TB care actually reaches the people who need it most.
Professor of Organic Chemistry and Neville Isdell Chair in African-centric Drug Discovery and Development
Department of Chemistry, Holistic Drug Discovery and Development (H3D) Centre
Thank you for founding H3D and proving that new medicines for malaria and TB can be discovered in Africa, by African scientists, for the patients closest to the diseases.
Professor and South African Research Chair in Physical Cosmology
Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics
Thank you for proposing the chameleon field as a graduate student and giving physics a testable new idea about dark energy, and for building world-class cosmology in Cape Town.
Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Complex Systems
Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics
Thank you for co-writing The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time with Stephen Hawking and then spending the decades since asking what the universe means as well as how it works, always with courage and conscience.
Director of the Desmond Tutu HIV Centre
Desmond Tutu HIV Centre, Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine
Thank you for taking HIV prevention out of the clinic and into communities, from tuberculosis epidemiology to youth-centred trials, and for leading the International AIDS Society with the same warmth you bring to patients.
Chair of the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health
Department of Paediatrics and Child Health
Thank you for showing that a recycled plastic bottle can become an asthma spacer for a child who cannot afford one, and for research on children's lungs that changed WHO guidelines worldwide.
Chair of Neuropsychology
Departments of Psychology and Neurology, University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital
Thank you for discovering the brain mechanisms of dreaming and for insisting that feelings belong at the centre of the science of consciousness, bridging neuroscience and psychoanalysis when few dared.
Associate Professor and Director of the Creative Writing Programme
Department of English Literary Studies
Thank you for novels like The Institute for Taxi Poetry and High Low In-between that give Cape Town its own literary map, and for teaching a generation of South African writers to find their voice.
Professor of Economics and Director of the Development Policy Research Unit
School of Economics, Development Policy Research Unit
Thank you for two decades of honest evidence on wages, work, and poverty in Africa, and for making the Development Policy Research Unit the place policymakers turn to when they want the numbers straight.
Honorary Professor, Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance
Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance
Thank you for a lifetime arguing, with evidence and elegance, that Africa's structural transformation is a choice within reach, and for bringing that conviction from the UN Economic Commission for Africa into the classroom.
Emeritus Professor, Faculty of Law
Department of Public Law
Thank you for helping draft South Africa's first Bill of Rights and for serving as UCT's youngest and longest-serving Chair of Public Law, teaching that the constitution is a promise kept daily.
This directory is unbounded, in pursuit of every professor at every university, everywhere. Every person is real, public, and cited; anyone featured can ask to be updated or removed.
If you are on this page and would rather not be, write to that address and say so. No account, no form, no one will ask you to reconsider, and we will not put you back.
A celebration of the faculty and academic leaders of University of Cape Town, assembled entirely from public information as an act of credit and gratitude. It is not a claim of endorsement, affiliation, sponsorship, or partnership by anyone featured or by the university. Every person is real and publicly documented, with a cited source of truth on their card; we never invent a person or a claim, and we prize accuracy over speed. Anyone featured can ask to be updated or removed at any time. Names and marks belong to their owners.