Alumni in the News

Alumni from the Wits School of Accountancy have clinched top 10 positions countrywide in Part I and Part II of the Qualifying Examinations (QE) set by the national South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA).

A study co-authored by a Wits scientist suggests that human ancestors first used fire 300 000 years earlier than the one million year previous estimate.

A media student, an environmentalist, a psychologist and a writer clamber into an old Volvo station wagon. They are all Witsies and they are all women.

A trio of Sunday Times investigative reporters including Witsie Rob Rose won the prestigious 2011 Taco Kuiper Award for Investigative Journalism.

He may work in a futuristic, hi-tech industry, but Derek Wilcocks admits he is fascinated by the past.

DISTINGUISHED professor Jared Borowitz does not "do" fools. Neither is he into conspiracy theorists, supernaturalists, card cheats, movie queue-jumpers or religious fundamentalists — to name just a few of the irritants that savage his rational world.

But the singer-songwriter simply has no desire to slow down. “I do what I do because I enjoy it,” Clegg says, “it’s not a job … I simply love connecting with and entertaining people.”

The Centre for Jazz & Popular Music (UKZN) is proud to present one of Gauteng’s top vocalists Zarcia Zacheus on May 9

Prishani Naidoo is a writer, researcher and lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Wits University.

WASHINGTON, D.C.: In an unprecedented collegial exchange of information, Professor Lee Berger, a renowned paleoanthropologist from the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand, donated casts of the Australopithecus sediba fossils to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, February 10, 2011.

NEW YORK: The University of the Witwatersrand Fund, Inc. (Wits Fund) hosted a Dinner in New York City on Tuesday May 8, 2012. Held in the beautiful University Club building on Fifth Avenue, the event celebrated Wits 90th anniversary and honoured the Vice-Chancellor and Principal, Professor Loyiso Nongxa. In addition, four distinguished alumni were honoured.

WASHINGTON, D.C.: The United States Army bestowed the Commander’s Award for Civilian Service on alumnus Alan Levy, 77, for his contribution to the construction of facilities that greatly benefited Soldiers and Families of the Army. Levy retired as Project Manager, Facilities Management Directorate in September 2011 after 11 years’ service.

Lidija Marelic received an Honours Degree in Dramatic Arts from Wits, with a research project centred on semiotics in directing for theatre. She has performed at the National Arts Festival, Grahamstown on several occasions including in a one woman show which she wrote, and directed.

Ronnie Apteker has not slept. He went to bed at 03:00 and was up at 05:00. That’s normal for this Wits alumnus (MSc cum laude 1994), who describes himself as a nerd and who was one of the founders of Internet Solutions in 1993.

It’s difficult to imagine but there was a time when Danny K wasn’t sure he would make it in the music industry.

The missing Peking Man fossils remain one of the greatest palaeo-anthropological mysteries in the history of the science. In a paper published in the South African Journal of Science, Professor Lee Berger (PhD 1994) investigates what may have been the last sighting of these fossils, which disappeared in 1941 when World War II reached the Pacific.

Wits architectural alumni won a national design competition to design the Wits Art Museum (WAM), which opens to the public on 19 May.

Professor Lee Berger from the Wits Institute of Human Evolution presented fossil replicas of two of the most complete skeletons of early human relatives ever found, to the Natural History Museum (Museum für Naturkunde) in Berlin, Germany, on 12 March 2012.

An international team of palaeontologists led by Dr Juan Cisneros (PhD 2007) published a paper describing the oldest predator known from South America in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on 16 January 2012.

The 2011 Wits Sportswoman of the Year, Natasha Glassford represented South Africa at the Commonwealth Judo Championships in Cardiff, Wales, from 22-25 January 2012. Glassford finished fifth in the open category she elected to enter despite these contenders being up to 20kg heavier.