Pro Vice-Chancellors
At UCT a Pro Vice-Chancellor is responsible for strengthening and raising the profile (both internally and externally) of a particular major strategic area or initiative that crosses faculty and departmental boundaries.
They do this by lending it central institutional support, providing academic leadership, fostering co-operation between and communicating with internal and external stakeholders, and by creating synergies between key areas of community interest and the existing research strengths of UCT, as well as by leading fundraising efforts in regard to the initiative.
Professor Mark New | Emeritus Professor Francis Wilson
Professor Mark New is the Pro Vice-Chancellor and director of the African Climate and Development Initiative (ACDI).
New acts on behalf of the vice-chancellor's office to provide enhanced academic leadership around the strategic goal of addressing the climate and development challenges of Africa from an African perspective, and he takes the lead in facilitating and substantially extending climate research at UCT, as well as continuing his own research.
Profile
Professor New graduated from UCT with a BSc Geology in 1986 and completed his honours the following year. He received an MPhil in Environment and Development from Cambridge University in 1992 and a PhD in Geography (Climate Change and Hydrology) from the same institution in 1998.
Over the last 12 years, New was involved in two outstanding Masters programmes at Oxford University's School of Geography and Environment: as a lecturer on the MSc in Environmental Change and Management, which has a strong climate change science and policy focus, and from 1995 as Academic Director of the MSc in Water Science, Policy and Management. He successfully supervised a number of doctoral students.
He has an international reputation and track record and has attracted significant external funding for large research programmes.
His research and consulting expertise in climate change, especially with respect to development in Africa, spans key interlinked areas of climate science: climate monitoring, climate modelling, impacts assessment, especially with regard to water, and adaptation. In addition to cutting edge research in the United Kingdom, New also has experience of climate and development issues through work in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and South America.
New also has a wide range of experience and professional training in communicating with stakeholders who range from lay public, through to media organisations, NGOs, industry and government agency professionals and government departments.
Emeritus Professor Francis Wilson
Emeritus Professor Francis Wilson is serving as acting Pro Vice-Chancellor for Poverty and Inequality until September 2012.
The poverty and inequality initiative is one of UCT's key institution-wide initiatives which seek to address critical social challenges. Wilson's main responsibility is to organise a national conference, to be called the Carnegie III Conference on Poverty and Inequality - Phase I, in support of the National Planning Commission's work. In preparation for this, he is identifying all research across faculties at UCT that are relevant to this theme, and developing a research agenda for the next few years.
Profile
Wilson has been teaching and researching for over 40 years in the School of Economics, where he founded, and for many years directed, the Southern African Labour and Development Research Unit out of which grew DataFirst as an independent resource centre. His main work has been in labour (gold mines; migration; farms), South African history and poverty. He directed the second Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development in Southern Africa during the 1980s and coordinated one national and one local integrated household survey in the 1990s.
During the 1990s Wilson was chairperson both of the Council at the University of Fort Hare and of the National Water Advisory Council. Later he was chairperson of the International Social Science Council's Scientific Committee of CROP, the international Comparative Research Programme on Poverty, based in Norway. A former UCT orator, Wilson is the author of a number of books, chapters, and articles, including Labour in the South African Gold Mines (Cambridge, 1972) and, with Dr Mamphela Ramphele, Uprooting Poverty: The South African Challenge (Cape Town & New York, 1989). His very popular book, Dinosaurs, Diamonds and Democracy: A short, short history of South Africa (Cape Town, 2009), is one of the bestselling books in its genre.