Deputy vice-chancellors

UCT’s deputy vice-chancellors (DVCs) are:

• Research and Internationalisation: Professor Sue Harrison
• Teaching and Learning: Associate Professor Lis Lange
• Transformation (Acting): Professor Martin Hall

Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research and Internationalisation

Professor Sue Harrison

Professor Sue Harrison was appointed Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Internationalisation with effect from 1 August 2019.

Profile

Her portfolio includes advancing the research quality, quantity and impact across the university, enhancing UCT’s African agenda, internationalization and research partnerships, growing and transforming the postgraduate sector and oversight of interdisciplinary university research institutes.

She has a long, varied track record in management and leadership, starting with her headship of Chemical Engineering some 20 years back, through serving as Deputy Dean: Postgraduate and Research for 6 years. Her research and teaching career extend over some 30 years. She has led research groupings and championed interdisciplinary research capacity at UCT, as well as the role of soft-funded researchers. Her contribution to UCT’s research management is shown through her ongoing involvement with research and postgraduate committees and working groups at UCT. Her contribution to research nationally has been demonstrated through her leadership role in the nurturing of innovation and in the implementation plans for the bioeconomy strategy.

Education:

• BSc majoring in Chemistry and Microbiology, UCT
• BSc Honours in Microbiology, UCT
• PhD (Chemical Engineering), Cambridge University

Awards, Honours and Membership of Societies:

• MASSAf, MSCI, FSAAE, FWISA, FSAIMM, MSASM, MSAIChE, MIWA
• Awarded South Africa’s Distinguished Woman Scientist of 2007
• Awarded SARChI Chair in Bioprocess Engineering in 2008
• Elected to UCT’s College of Fellows in 2015
• Awarded the national NSTF–South 32 award for Research and Engineering capacity development in 2016
• NRF rating: B1

Recent Career Experience:

• 6 years as Deputy Dean: Postgraduate and Research: Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, UCT (2010–2015)
• 5 years as Head of Department, Chemical Engineering
• 29 years as an academic at the University of Cape Town
• 19 years as Professor of Chemical Engineering
• 18 years as Director: Centre for Bioprocess Engineering Research, CeBER
• 3 years as Director: Future Water, UCT’s interdisciplinary water research institute
• SARChI Research Chair in Bioprocess Engineering (2008–2019)
• Chair: Board of Trustees, Cape Biotech Trust (2005–2010)
• Member of the Board of the Technology Innovation Agency in South Africa (2009 – May 2012)
• Teaching or visiting researcher positions at University of the Western Cape, Stellenbosch University, University of the Free State, Exeter University (UK), MIT (USA), Cambridge University (UK), University of Zambia (Zambia) and Central South University (Changsa, China)

Research profile:

• Co-authored 207 research papers in refereed journals (129), conference proceedings (68) and book chapters (10)
• H–index of 37 on Google Scholar and 29 on Scopus
• Supervised 111 postgraduate students to completion (20 PhD and 91 MSc degrees of which 50 were awarded to women and 62 to Black students).

Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Teaching and Learning

Associate Professor Lis Lange

Associate Professor Lis Lange’s term of office began on 1 February 2018.

Profile

Lange joined UCT from the University of the Free State (UFS), where she has held the same position. Before that she headed UFS’s Institutional and Academic Planning and Research Department from 2011 to 2014. She was an executive director for the Higher Education Quality Committee in the Council on Higher Education (CHE) from 2006 to 2010 and was acting CEO of the CHE from 2007 to 2008. During her service in the CHE, she secured funding for research projects on higher education from the following international funders: Fulbright, Nuffic, Carnegie Corporation and Ford Foundation.

Lange was born in Argentina and is a permanent resident in South Africa. She earned a BA(Hons) in history from the University of Buenos Aires in 1984, an MA in African studies from El Colegio de Mexico in 1988, and a PhD in history from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1998.

Lange’s research interests focus on the philosophy and politics of education. She has done research on change in higher education as well as on the meanings and possibilities of the notion of transformation, especially at curricular level. Her current work is on higher education curriculum and pedagogy in the context of the call for decolonisation of the curriculum.

She has participated on a number of national task teams of higher education, including

• University Fees, Council on Higher Education, 2016
• Transfer of the Colleges of Agriculture from the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries to the Department of Higher Education and Training, 2016
• Funding of Higher Education, Department of Higher Education and Training, 2012
• Consensus Group on the Humanities, South African Academy of Science, 2009–2010
• Quality of Academic Journals, South African Academy of Sciences, 2006–2008.

Lange is the author of White, Poor and Angry: White working class families in Johannesburg (Ashgate, UK, 2003) and co-editor with Leonhard Praeg of #MustFall: Understanding the moment (UKZN University Press, forthcoming 2018). A small sampling of the policy research she has conducted on South African higher education includes, among other reports

• “Teaching and learning beyond formal access: Assessment through the looking glass” (Higher Education Monitor, No 10, 2010)
• “Access and throughput in South Africa: Three case studies, 2006–2008” (Higher Education Monitor, No 9, 2010)
• “Postgraduate studies in South Africa: A statistical profile” (Higher Education Monitor, No 7, 2009).

Portfolio responsibilities

• Teaching and Learning

Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Transformation (Acting)

Emeritus Professor Martin Hall

View Emeritus Professor Martin Hall's CV.