Dr Lidia Auret of our Department won the prestigious Chancellor's Award at the December 2010 graduation ceremony. After completing her Master's studies in 2 years, her degree was upgraded to a PhD which she completed during the following year - all by the age of 25. Her promoter was Prof Chris Aldrich, and the title of her studies was "Process Monitoring and Fault Diagnosis using Random Forests". The average over 4 years for her undergraduate studies was 87.8%. To continue with her post-doctoral studies, she has received a fellowship from the Claude Leon Foundation.
The Department of Process Engineering hosted the 3rd annual intervarsity brewing competition sponsored by SAB, FoodBev Seta and the Institute of Brewing and Distilling (IBD). The event was a great success and the University of Pretoria won with the best beer. Stellenbosch University's team managed to get a third place in the speciality category with their Honey Pils.
Team members (from left to right): Nardus Uys (1st year Process Engineering), Leonardo Erazo (MSc Wine Technology), Eben Uys (PhD Process Engineering), Antoine Mfa Mezui (PhD Microbiology) and Reinhardt Barnard (1st year Process Engineering).
SA Women Engineering (SAWomEng) conference 2010
The 5-day SAWomEng conference is a flagship event that brings the top female engineering students from around South Africa together to tackle social and engineering problems by finding engineering solutions. It provides a forum where students, sponsors, academics, government and industry can come together to share their knowledge, passion and experience in the field of engineering. It also motivates engineering as a highly desirable career aspiration for women and aims to empower women to succeed and advance in this field. This year 3 students from our department were chosen as delegates: Analene Beyers, Nadia Church and Megan Van Ster.
