Dr Itumeleng Monageng and Dr Jan Buys win P Rated Researchers awards

Two young scholars from the University of Cape Town (UCT) walked away with the coveted P-Rated Researchers accolades at the National Research Foundation (NRF) Awards. They are Dr Itumeleng Monageng, an astrophysicist currently holding a joint position between UCT and the South African Astronomical Observatory (NRF-SAAO); and Dr Jan Buys, a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science at UCT.

A “P” rating is assigned to researchers (normally under 35 years of age) considered likely to become future international leaders in their respective fields, on the basis of exceptional potential demonstrated in research performance and output during doctoral and/or early post-doctoral careers. Another criterion is that they should have held a Doctorate or equivalent qualification for less than five years at the time of application. 

Dr Monageng conducts research on interacting binary stars, where he uses data from telescopes to understand the physical processes taking place in these systems. He completed his PhD in 2018 after which he briefly joined the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) operations team, where he performed service observing for an international research community. 

Dr Monageng held a postdoctoral position at the NRF-SAAO where he continued his research on interacting stellar systems. He has co-authored 38 publications since 2017 and is currently supervising several postgraduate students. Also, he has been awarded several prizes, including selection as one of the top 20 young scientists for the prestigious 69th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings and the College of Fellows Young Researcher Award. 

Dr Buys completed his Doctorate at the University of Oxford and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington. His research area is Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning, with a particular focus on text generation and low-resource NLP. His research has developed methods to incorporate linguistic structure into language models and algorithms for generating text from language models. Dr Buys’s current research focuses on developing better language models for low-resource South African languages.

The NRF rating system is a key driver in the NRF’s aim to build a globally competitive science system in South Africa. It is a valuable tool for benchmarking the quality of our researchers against the best in the world. NRF ratings are allocated based on a researcher’s recent research outputs and impact as perceived by international peer reviewers. The rating system encourages researchers to publish high quality outputs in high impact journals/outlets. Rated researchers as supervisors will impart cutting-edge skills to the next generation of researchers.