By Kim Barker
As Scifest draws to a close on Tuesday, an international group of committed scientists will be hard at work right next door in the Gavin Relly Postgraduate Village, Rhodes University, Grahamstown.
The Biomedical Biotechnology Research Unit (BioBRU) at Rhodes University, under the directorship of Professor Greg Blatch, will be holding their annual two-day research retreat this week. This research unit, launched at Rhodes early in 2009, conducts internationally-recognised, groundbreaking research that has implications for the prevention and treatment of both malaria and cancer.
The opening of this year’s retreat which will be attended by Rhodes Vice-Chancellor, Dr Saleem Badat and Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research & Development, Dr Peter Clayton, will be an opportunity to acknowledge the role that Rhodes has played in supporting the establishment of BioBRU. The retreat will also be attended by several top international research scientists who collaborate with BioBRU in their malaria research.
Through a recent grant awarded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) German-African Cooperation Projects in Infectology Programme, BioBRU has been able to develop close collaborative ties with the handful of other research laboratories internationally who are doing similar work with stress proteins in malaria.
Two of these laboratories are represented at the retreat. Dr Jude Przyborski from the University of Marburg, Germany and Dr Addmore Shonhai (a former PhD student of Prof Blatch’s) and colleagues from the University of Zululand will take an active role in the proceedings.
The retreat is an opportunity for all members of BioBRU, from master’s students and doctoral candidates to postdoctoral research fellows and academic staff, to gather and present the progress they are making with their research. Each presenter is encouraged to rigorously interrogate all aspects of their research design and there is time for robust discussion and input from all participants after each presentation.
For Prof Blatch this retreat is an essential component of BioBRU’s ethos and success as it offers all members the opportunity to express their own opinions and to argue effectively as well as learning to be open to critique and the ideas of others.
Research designs are refined and clarified and there is opportunity for cross-pollination of ideas across the different research strands in the unit. ”This is an essential part of the process of becoming an academic,” says Prof Blatch.