Africa Month is about celebrating our heritage, yes, but it's also a platform to showcase how UCT, through its research, keeps its promise of being an Afropolitan university. It was in this spirit that Professor Kelly Chibale of UCT's Department of Chemistry delivered a lecture on 8 May titled Drug Discovery in Africa: Challenges, Status and Opportunities, which formed part of a Merck seminar series. Read more ...

A new book by UCT's Dr Patricia Henderson, titled AIDS, Intimacy and Care in Rural KwaZulu-Natal: A Kinship of Bones, took centre stage at a launch hosted by the Institute for the Humanities in Africa (HUMA) on 7 May, an event that also formed part of UCT's Celebrating Africa Month. Read more ...

On Freedom Day, 21 UCT students - most from Groote Schuur Residence - checked in for a day of manual labour on an Ottery farm, there adding the finishing touches to a crèche established by the Fellowship Bible Church Christian School. The crèche, which opened earlier this year, offers schooling to children with foetal alcohol syndrome and other learning challenges Read more ...

Dr Nastassja Koen, a UCT medical graduate, has been named as the first recipient of a new fellowship that will focus on training in the important area of psychopharmacology. The fellowship has been awarded by Servier, a pharmaceutical company that has previously funded research in cardiology at UCT and now has a growing interest in psychiatric treatments. Read more ...

In his 2007 inaugural lecture titled The Future of Medicine, UCT's Professor Bongani Mayosi threw a pebble into a pool. It's an idea Mayosi would pitch again, on behalf of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), in its 2009 Consensus Report on Revitalising Clinical Research in South Africa: A study on clinical research and related training in South Africa, chairing ASSAf's 13-member study panel. Read more ...

Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences, Professor Marian Jacobs, writes about the faculty's centenary celebrations this year. 2012 is a special year for the Faculty of Health Sciences: we have the privilege of celebrating a remarkable milestone on 6 June, 100 years after the first medical school buildings, Anatomy and Physiology, were opened on Hiddingh Campus in 1912. Read more ...

UCT's Alan Pifer Award comes with some exacting demands. According to the adjudicators, the work of 2011 recipient Professor Kelly Chibale on drug discovery in Africa has surpassed those criteria. Read more ...

The 500 or so international health care professionals who make up the World Doctors Orchestra do it, yes, for the love of the music, but moreover, to spread the word: basic health care for all. One of UCT's own, professor of primary health care, Steve Reid, who wowed the audience when he took to the piano during his inaugural lecture Music of Health for All in August, plays the violin in the ensemble. Read more ...

Health educators are now set to improve their skills, thanks to a postgraduate diploma in health professional education, launched by UCT in January. Read more ...