Posted by Dr Serena Coetzee on 17 Mar 2009, 08:03 (last modified on 17 Mar 2009, 21:03)

The Department is proud to announce that two professors have again been declared Exceptional Achievers by the University. Professor Judith Bishop and Professor Extraordinary Jan Eloff will receive their awards at a ceremony on 25 March. The university makes these awards annually to professors who have maintained continuous exceptional achievement in the fields of under- and postgraduate teaching and learning, research, community service and administration, and who enjoy exceptionally high stature among their peers. The number of holders per year is limited to 50. This is the second time Profs Bishop and Eloff have received the award. The Department also has a third awardee in Prof Andries Engelbrecht who received the Exceptional Young Researchers Award in 2007.

Prof Bishop is a professor in the Department of Computer Science in the Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology. Her expertise is in programming languages and distributed systems. Her recent work, performed with the Polelo Research Group and collaborators at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, has drawn together the principles of modern languages and adaptive and mobile systems. She has 90 publications, including 15 books that are available in six languages and are read worldwide. Her most recent book, C# 3.0 Design Patterns, was published in 2008. Other recent successes include a system called Linca for secure cryptography, for which her student won the S2A3 Bronze Medal, and Krystal, a social network system that went to the national finals of the Imagine Cup. Prof Bishop serves on international editorial, programme and award committees. She is recognised nationally and internationally for her work. She received the South African Computer Society Fellowship Award and was nominated as one of the leading minds at the University of Pretoria over the last century, both in 2008. This is the second time that she has received the Exceptional Academic Achiever Award, and she has a B2 rating from the NRF.

Jan Eloff is currently appointed as Research Director at SAP Meraka UTD and as an Extraordinary Professor in the Department Computer Science at the University of Pretoria. From October 2002 to 2008 he was appointed Head of the Department and full professor in Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pretoria. From 2005 to 2008 he has also chaired UP’s School of Information Technology. In 2006 he received an Outstanding Academic Achiever award from the University of Pretoria in recognition of his research efforts. In 2008 he received the Leading Minds in Research Award from the University of Pretoria for his research contributions. From 2004 to 2006 he was the President of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists (SAICSIT). He is an associate editor of the international computer security journal, Computers & Security. At the University of Pretoria he is one of the founders of the Information and Computer Security Architectures (ICSA) research laboratory, which is part of the Department of Computer Science. An evaluated researcher from the National Research Foundation (NRF), he currently holds a B-rating from the NRF.