Alumni in the spotlight November 2023
- Wits Alumni Relations
Catch up on a wrap of Witsie appointments, awards and newsmakers from the past month.
Appointments
Mpho Sadiki (BSc 2005, PDipMan 2007, MBA 2014) was appointed as group managing director of Merchant Solutions Africa. He is a fintech professional with over 15 years of executive management experience in the financial services and payments industry. His most recent role was as chief product officer at Bankserv Africa. He also held key positions at Nedbank and Deloitte.
South African petrochemical company Sasol announced that Simon Baloyi (BSc Eng 2000, MSc Eng 2002) will take on the role of president and CEO of the company from 1 April 2024. He is currently executive vice president of energy operations and technology.
Child vaccination public-private partnership Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, has appointed Professor Helen Rees as its Vaccine Investment Strategy steering committee chairperson. Rees is an expert in vaccine implementation and delivery, vaccine research and development, regulatory science and infectious disease epidemiology.
Momentum Metropolitan appointment of Dumo Mbethe (BCom 2002) as executive director to its board. He is a seasoned executive and business leader with more than 20 years of experience in the financial services industry. He joined Momentum Metropolitan in January 2017 as COO of the Africa and Asia business and became CEO of the Africa business in October 2017. In September 2019, he was appointed as CEO of the Momentum Corporate business, a position he continues to hold.
Graeme Reid (BA 1987, BA Hons 1988, MA 2000) was named the the new United Nations Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI). Reid is currently serving as the Director of the LGBT Rights Program at Human Rights Watch in New York. Before joining the organisation in 2011, Reid was the founding director of the Gay and Lesbian Archives (now known as The GALA Queer Archive) at Wits and a lecturer in LGBT Studies at Yale University.
Awards
Veteran actor Dr John Kani (DLitt honoris causa 2020) has been honoured as the honorary officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in recognition of his services to drama by King Charles III.
Johannesburg-based attorney, Bulelwa Mabasa (BA 2000, LLB 2002), was announced as the winner of the Non-fiction Award for her book My Land Obsession: A Memoir (Picador, 2022) in the 2023 Sunday Times Literary Awards.
Prof Glenda Gray (MBBCh 1986) was awarded the Academy of Science of South Africa Science for Society Gold Medal for outstanding achievement. 
Ann Nurock (BA 1978) was awarded the AdFocus Lifetime Achievement Award for her positive impact on the advertising industry in South Africa. She is the Africa partner of Relationship Audits, a global consultancy that measures and optimises strategic business relationships, with its primary focus on client-agency relationships. Before establishing Relationship Audits, Nurock spent more than 25 years in the communications industry, primarily with Grey Advertising, moving up the ranks till she was appointed MD of Grey SA in 2000 and CEO and head of the Africa region in 2003. Under her leadership the agency doubled its size in three years. In 2007 it was ranked one of the top-performing new business and creative agencies in the Grey Global network and one of the top three in SA. Nurock was recognised that year as one of the three most influential women in the communications industry.
Professor Lizette Koekemoer (PhD 1999) won the Women in Vector Control Excellence Award in the Senior Career category.
Professor Stephen Tollman (BSc 1979, MBBCh 1984, MMed 1999) has received the 2023 Alumni Award of Merit from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health for his outstanding contributions to population-based health research across Africa.
Professor Peter Kamerman (BSc 1997, BSc Hons 1998, DSc 2002) and Professor Shabir Madhi (MBBCh 1990, MMed 1999, PhD 2004) were inducted as Fellows of the Royal Society of South Africa at a ceremony held in Pretoria on 4 November 2023. The Society also awarded Professor Jennifer Fitchett (BSc 2012, MSc 2013, PhD 2015) the 2023 Meiring Naudé Medal, which recognises outstanding early career scientists (under 35-years-old) who have already made a mark in their field and who are poised to become scientific leaders.
Dr Mandla Radebe (BA Hons 2003, MA 2007, PhD 2017) was joint winner for The Lost Prince of the ANC: The Life and Times of Jabulani Nobleman 'Mzala' Nxumalo (Jacana 2022) at the 2023 South African Literary Awards in the Creative Non-Fiction Literary Award category.
Prof Tanja Sakota (BA DA 1994, MA 2001, PhD 2010) who has been awarded the Faculty of Humanities Notable Research Award for Monograph Publishing. Prof Sakota is a writer, filmmaker, artistic researcher and associate professor at the Wits School of Arts, Film and Television Department. Her book on pedagogical film practice, Uncovering Memory, takes the reader on an extraordinary journey through South Africa, Germany, Poland and Bosnia/Herzegovina as she explores memory and forgetting, segregation and migration, perpetrators and victims, inviting filmmakers and readers into a conversation around practice-based research, autoethnography and film.
Dr Bradley Segal (MBBCh 2021, MSc Eng 2022) is among the 10 scholars from Southern Africa to be awarded the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University in 2024.
Malcolm Weaich (BSc Hon Quantity Surveying 2023) a young academic researcher who was awarded “Best Overall Youth U/35 Award” at the 13th South African Council for the Quantity Surveying Profession International Research Conference. Weaich was recognised for his research on the "Willingness of End-Users to Adopt Sustainable Housing in South Africa," shedding light on the critical role quantity surveyors can play in making sustainability affordable.
Kiara Haylock (BSc Hon 2017) won 1st place for best PhD full presentation and won overall best presentation for her talk titled “Sable antelope display flexibility in body temperature regulation and behavioural patterns during the dry season” at the SAWMA Student Presentation Awards at the recent Southern African Wildlife Management Conference.
Newsmakers
The main grandstand at the Wits Football Stadium has been renamed after Wits alumnus Ronnie Schloss (BSc Quantity Surveying 1968) for his commitment to the club and soccer in South Africa. Schloss is a former Wits football player, administrator, and life president of the Premier Soccer League (PSL) in South Africa. 
Kagiso Khaole (BCom 2007, MBA 2020) general manager of ride-hailing and food delivery company Uber’s operations in Sub-Saharan Africa, chatted to the Financial Mail.
William Kentridge (BA 1977, DLitt honoris causa 2004) opened his latest exhibition What Have They Done with All the Air? with the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town. The exhibition features drawings from the exhibition linked to a work-in-progress production The Great Yes, The Great No about a historical ship voyage from Marseille and Martinque. He chatted to Sean O’ Toole about it.