Overseas Experience: An Invaluable Asset

October 18, 2005
By Richard Flockemann

The Chemistry Department's award-winning Professor Nyokong, who works closely with students from other African countries, and who has good relationships with several European institutions, says overseas experience is invaluable for her chemistry PhD students.

Professor Tebello Nyokong, Professor in Rhodes University's Chemistry Department, and recent winner of the Presidential Order of Mapungubwe award for her research into the development of cancer treatments, works closely with international students and international universities, and believes that experiences at overseas institutions provides an invaluable experience to the PhD students she supervises.

Spending time in overseas laboratories is important, says Professor Nyokong, because it opens students up to new ideas, and new ways of doing things - and this is valuable both for Rhodes students going overseas, as well as for overseas students coming here to Rhodes. It is important, she thinks, that students get a feel for how laboratories operate elsewhere in the world.

Professor Nyokong has agreements with Universities in the UK, France, Sweden and Belgium, whereby PhD students under her supervision will spend several months a year working at an overseas institution, while students from these institutions will spend several months here at Rhodes in return. Professor Nyokong believes that the focus of European chemistry departments is sufficiently different from the focus of Rhodes's chemistry department, which makes spending time in both laboratories beneficial both for Rhodes and European students. In Europe, she explains, chemistry departments tend to specialise a great deal more than at Rhodes, so basic skills, like synthesising chemicals, "have been lost" by European departments. At Rhodes, Professor Nyokong explains, "we try to train students in many aspects of research, so to make them flexible and more appropriate to the marketplace". Students are thus encouraged to learn the basic skills as well as the more specialised ones, so as to produce students equipped with a more diverse range of skills in order to be prepared for a less stable market-place.

Rhodes' focus on the basics, like synthesising, has contributed greatly to the good international relations that Professor Nyokong has established. Given that European universities will generally try to buy synthesised chemicals rather than produce them themselves, Professor Nyokong uses Rhodes' synthesising skills as means of establishing research collaborations. The Chemistry Department frequently provides synthesised chemicals (usually done by Rhodes students) to European chemists, but instead of receiving payment for this, Rhodes will simply collaborate with these researchers - thereby not only bringing in new avenues of research into South Africa, but also setting up favourable relations with overseas institutes. This in turn makes it easier to establish exchange agreements.

Many of the students Professor Nyokong supervises are students from foreign African countries with seven of her present thirteen PhD students being from countries such as Nigeria, Lesotho, and Zimbabwe. Of her past PhD students, many have gone into academia both here in South African (two are presently employed at Rhodes) and elsewhere in the world.

Professor Nyokong is well known for her work on developing drugs for cancer treatment, having published several high profile papers, and winning awards for her work, including the aforementioned Order of Mapungubwe award, from President Thabo Mbeki this year, and the SABC-3/Shoprite-Checkers Woman of the Year Award: Science & Technology in 2004 and the Vice-Chancellor's Distinguished Senior Research Award in 2003.