“The UCT MEGA-HI group is composed of about 18+ students (Honours, MSc, and PhD) and post-docs funded by my SARAO SARChI grant plus external collaborators. The group’s work focuses on the study of gas, particularly neutral hydrogen (HI), in and around galaxies in the local and distant universe in order to better understand how galaxies form and evolve. Over the past 3 years, the group has used the ilifu cluster to reduce and analyze data from MeerKAT open time projects and the Large Survey Projects, including MHONGOOSE, LADUMA, MIGHTEE-HI, and the MeerKAT Fornax Survey, as well as data from the Very Large Array (VLA), all combined with ancillary multi-wavelength data. This has resulted in over 20 peer-reviewed publications, four Honours dissertations, three MSc dissertations, and one PhD since 2022.”
Professor DJ Pisano, SARAO SARChI Chair, UCT.
The majority of the users on ilifu are postgraduate students (Honours, Master’s and PhD). They represent 54% (360/664) of the astronomy users, and 52% (135/262) of the bioinformatics users. The user support for postgraduate students’ work on data intensive research on the ilifu cloud facility is one of the tremendous strengths of IDIA.
Students are empowered to take ownership of their complex MeerKAT data and run their observations through a variety of supported pipelines and visualisation tools on the ilifu research cloud. Scientific highlights from these student research projects are showcased throughout this report, both in the Science Highlight section and in this section.
It is particularly good to see the strong increase from year to year in terms of the number of students graduating who have used ilifu as an essential part of their postgraduate research. We also see an excellent throughput of student graduations; for the IDIA partners 49% (88/178) of the students working on ilifu have completed their research. Based on the demographics of the students at the IDIA partner universities working on ilifu we notice that 56% are male and 44% are female, and 31% are white, 63% are black and 6% prefer not to declare. This is based on 99 responses of South African students who provided this information during a recent account renewal campaign.
The details are summarised in the table below and individual MSc and PhD graduates from the IDIA partner universities are listed at the end of this report. The career paths of the graduated MSc students reflect a mix of continuation to further studies at PhD level, and work as data scientist / software developer in industry or research institutes (SARAO or IDIA). The skills gained during their work with complex data are very transferable to industry.
Whilst there is a substantial international contingent of astronomy students (both in Africa and the rest of the World) it should be emphasised that only South African-led MeerKAT LSPs and Open Time projects are supported. These South African-led projects are often very international in nature, and international students therefore benefit from the access to ilifu.
This leads to two main advantages: 1) it creates a network of ilifu alumni around the world who are now studying or working at universities or SKA regional centres around the world, becoming ambassadors for ilifu, and 2) the South African students establish a critical network of peers within the context of the international SKA. The table shows the countries of origin of the international students and they are largely linked to the international SKA community.
| 2018-2024 | Data-Intensive Astronomy | Bioinformatics | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total | Graduated* | PhD | MSc | Hons | Total | |
| UCT | 94 | 50 | 23 | 48 | 23 | 69 |
| UWC | 39 | 16 | 14 | 22 | 3 | 15 |
| UP | 45 | 22 | 10 | 23 | 12 | – |
| Other South Africa | 65 | 17 | 28 | 30 | 7 | 36 |
| Other Africa | 10 | 4 | 5 | 5 | – | 13 |
| Other International | 107 | 39 | 72 | 23 | 12 | 2 |
| Total | 360 | 148 | 152 | 151 | 57 | 135 |
Graduated*: covers the period of 2018-2024 and includes PhD, MSc and Hons students. Other South Africa (Astronomy): NWU (11), RU (11), SAAO (3), SU (5), UFS (4), UJ (1), UNISA (6), UKZN (6), UNIVEN (3), Wits (15). Other Africa (Astronomy): Ethiopia (2), Mauritius (2), Madagascar (2), Kenya (2), Benin (1), Zambia (1). Other International (Astronomy): Australia (11), Canada (3), China (5), France (3), Germany (7), India (3), Israel (2), Italy (6), Japan (9), Netherlands (19), New Zealand (1), Spain (3), Sweden (1), UK (26), USA (8). Other South Africa (Bioinformatics): CPUT (2), RU (2), SAMRC (1), SANBI (1), SPU (1), SU (25), UJ (1), UFS (2), Wits (1). Other Africa (Bioinformatics): Botswana (1), Ghana (3), Kenya (1), Mauritius (1), Morocco (1), Nigeria (4), Uganda (2). Other International (Bioinformatics): USA (2)
