2012 Health Sciences Award winners

Years of hard work, commitment and dedication paid off for Health Sciences staff members and students when they were honoured at the 2012 Faculty Awards ceremony recently. 

The 38^th prize-giving ceremony took place amidst loud cheers and jubilation. The awards pay tribute to their academic achievements in the areas of research, learning and teaching. 

Prof. Ahmed Wadee, Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences, welcomed the guests and said that the ceremony was one of the few annual gatherings at which staff, students, parents and friends gathered to recognise excellence in all years of study. 

“Those being honoured are a highly select group from amongst the student and staff population in our Faculty. They have been singled out as the top achievers in their field; they stand out as the ones that their peers respect and admire; they are the standard-setters and the likely leaders in their fields in the future,” said Wadee. 

The guest speaker was Professor Saraladevi Naicker, Academic Head of Internal Medicine in the Faculty. “This must be the culmination of dreams you have woven over the years. But, it does not end here – in fact – the hard work only starts now. You need to love what you do, or what you are doing will be in vain,” said Naicker. 

The Faculty Research Prize, which is the most prestigious prize, offered by the Faculty of Health Sciences in recognition of excellence in research, was awarded to Dr Kebashni Thandrayen for her publication Heterogeneity of fracture pathogenesis in urban South African children: The Birth to Twenty Cohort, published in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research in December 2011. 

This is the first study describing ethnic differences in fracture risk and bone mass in urban South African children. Currently Thandrayen is practicing as a paediatrician at the Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital. 

An inaugural award introduced this year is the Bioethics Prize, which was received by Mazvita Zanamwe for achieving the highest mark for Bioethics across all undergraduate programmes in the Faculty. 

The prize serves as another example of the Centre’s commitment to inculcate an ethics and professionalism ethos amongst students.