On November 09, 2011, in Cape Town, the Irish Minister of State for Trade and Development, Jan O’Sullivan, T.D., attended the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and Hibernia College Dublin that will see the two institutions collaborate in providing postgraduate education in the area of Regulatory Sciences.
The goal of the collaboration is to make this new programme available to a broader range of students in South Africa through a blend of onsite tuition and web enabled learning.
Welcoming the announcement Minister O’Sullivan said, “Ireland has a reputation as world education centre and has developed an international standing as a centre of quality education and training. Hibernia College gives international students world wide access to outstanding faculties and education. This agreement with UWC reflects the reputation of Hibernia College for innovation and outstanding service and underpins the strong tradition of collaboration between Ireland’s third level education sector and its counterparts in other countries.”
As an engaged historically disadvantaged university, UWC has taken significant strides in developing into a research-intensive university and is committed to supporting Africa’s development though research. By driving towards excellence in a number of research areas across different disciplines, with relatively limited resources, UWC is rising to the knowledge and development challenge.
Peter Eagles, Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UWC and Chairman of the Medicines Control Council of South Africa commented, “I am very happy that our two institutions can come together to share our resources and expertise and I’m confident that our relationship will benefit not only our students, but also the drug development industry both in South Africa and further afield”.
Hibernia College is an online college based in Ireland that offers internationally accredited postgraduate programmes to students in over 30 countries.
Since its establishment in 2000, the college has been steadily building an international reputation in the field of third and fourth level online education and has received international acclaim and awards for its innovative use of web based learning.
Most recently it became the first institution to achieve “Centre of Excellence” status from the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) – Pharmatrain Programme. The IMI is a unique collaboration between industry and academia established to support the faster discovery and development of better medicines for patients.
Jeremy Whitty, Director of Hibernia College’s IMI Pharmatrain Centre of Excellence in Medicines Development, explained, “Our objective is to ensure that students and industry professionals, first in South Africa, and eventually in the major emerging markets, have access to world class education and training in Regulatory Sciences and medicines development. We are very excited to be working with UWC and look forward to jointly tackling the challenges that lie ahead.”
Both Hibernia College and UWC are also involved with the “Novartis Research Day”, an event taking place at UWC that celebrates the work of Novartis’ African interns of 2011 and also aims to foster further collaboration between academia and the pharmaceutical industry.
About the University of the Western Cape
The University of the Western Cape was established in 1960 by the then apartheid government as a higher education institute for the “Coloured” sector of the South African population. It was classified as a historically disadvantaged institution post-1994 given the limited resources that the previous apartheid government had allocated to institutions catering for sections of the population that were not white. Since then the institution has taken significant strides in developing into a research-intensive university. Recent statistics released by the NRF place the institution 5th in the country for the proportion of the staff that has a NRF-rating, behind the previously advantaged universities of Cape Town, Stellenbosch, Witwatersrand and Rhodes. In recognition of the advances made in recent times, the University was awarded a DST/NRF Chair in Bioinformatics in 2007, a Research Chair in the area of Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies in 2009 and a SKA Research Chair in Astronomy and Astrophysics in 2010. Most recently, in 2011, the University was awarded a fourth Research Chair, namely the FirstRand Foundation South African Research Chair in Mathematics Education.
The University has several cutting-edge research areas in advanced technology. The South African National Bioinformatics Initiative is Africa’s leading Centre for Bioinformatics and one of 18 comparable centres world-wide, hosting a dedicated super Cray Computer for research. The University hosts a National Centre of Excellence, the DST/MinTek Nanotechnology Innovation Centre (NIC) Biolabels Unit as well as a Biosensors Lab, and the Department of Science and Technology has recently established a Nanoscience Centre at UWC to develop South Africa’s human capital needs in this area. The International Centre for Indigenous Phototherapy Studies (TICIPS) is a major UWC-University of Missouri (USA) project on indigenous knowledge systems within the South African Herbal Science and Medicine Institute. The University has major research programmes in Biotechnology and hydrogen fuel cells (instead of fossil fuel) as energy resource and hosts a DST National Centre of Competence in hydrogen fuel cell technology.
In establishing the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR), UWC has brought together a critical mass of outstanding academics with expertise across several disciplines. Cutting-edge research undertaken by the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) and by our academics in the Community Law Centre in human rights law and children’s rights continue to impact on policy formulation and development at national and international levels. The African Centre for Citizenship and Democracy has done sterling work towards the development of a more inclusive citizenship in the region and the African Continent. The UNESCO Centre of Excellence in Science and Mathematics Education in Africa, under the UNESCO Chair, has championed research capacity development in these areas.
UWC recently opened its new Life Sciences Building, a state-of-the-art structure for scientific research and the leading such facility on the Africa continent.