WELCOME MESSAGE
The year, 2024, has been a year of continued professional growth for me. It has been a huge honour to serve as the Vice-President of the South African Statistical Association (SASA) for the whole year, and I am humbled to be elevated to the position of SASA President for the next two years. I am deeply passionate and committed to the advancement of statistics in South Africa and abroad. Our role as statisticians in academia, industry and the society is gigantic and we need to firmly establish it in all spheres of life.
Serving as Vice-President of SASA and deputising Professor Inger Fabris-Rotelli has enabled me to gain vast experience in the leadership of SASA and the entire statistics community, and this further deepened my commitment to our field of statistics.
I have been part of the Department of Statistics and Operations Research at the University of Limpopo (UL) since April 2015. My academic career started in 2004 when I joined the Department of Applied Mathematics at the National University of Science and Technology (NUST), Zimbabwe, where I joined as a lecturer before I rose to the position of Head of Department four years later. In September 2009 I joined UL as a Lecturer for a short stint before joining Monash University in 2011. While at Monash University, I registered for a PhD in Mathematical Statistics in 2012 under the supervision of Professor James Cochran (University of Alabama, USA) and co-supervised by Professor Maseka Lesaoana (UL) which I completed in 2016. Just before completing my PhD, I rejoined UL in 2015 in a Lecturer position and got promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2016 soon after completing my PhD. In 2021, I got promoted to Association Professor of Statistics. The international supervision by Prof Cochran gave me the opportunity to apply for research grants from the International Statistical Institute (ISI) World Bank Trust Fund which, together with the support from Monash University, enabled me to travel abroad and present my research work during my PhD studies at various international statistical conferences including Australasian Applied Statistics Conference (Queenstown, New Zealand, 2012), Extreme Value Analysis (Shanghai, China, 2013), International Disaster and Risk Conference (Davos, Switzerland, 2014), ISI World Statistics Conference (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2015), among others. I have continued to trot the globe after completing my PhD studies for international conferences and research visits.
In terms of professional development post-PhD, I completed a certificate course in Doctoral Supervision with the African Doctoral Academy (Stellenbosch University, 2017), a certificate course in SARIMA Ethics and Integrity (University of Witwatersrand, 2022), and a Postgraduate Diploma in Higher Education and Training (cum laude and Dean’s Merit Award) from Durban University of Technology (2022).
I am a National Research Foundation (NRF) C2-Rated Researcher with an H-index of 14 and over 50 journal articles (mainly in extreme value theory) and two book chapters. In my professional career as a researcher, I have received several research awards including the Best Overall Early-Career Researcher of the Year (Monash University, 2013), Best Overall Established Researcher in the School (UL, 2022), among others. I serve on the NRF Physics, Astronomy, Mathematics and ICT grant review panels for Competitive Programme for Rated and Unrated Researchers (CPRR and CSUR) and Y-Rated Researchers. I am the Chairperson of the Turfloop Research Ethics Committee (TREC) which is the University of Limpopo’s supreme research ethics committee for humans, public health, science and agriculture. I also serve in the Faculty Higher Degrees Committee (FHDC) and other various committees at UL. In addition, I am the current Head of Department of Statistics and Operations Research.
I have been a member of SASA since 2010 and a member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) since 2014. As I emerged from early-career researcher to established researcher and supervisor, I have been exposed to many of the Statistics departments in our beautiful country. I have witnessed huge commitment and determination from my fellow researchers in the statistics community, rubbed shoulders with excellent lecturers, amazing supervisors and outstanding researchers. In all this great exposure, I have developed a lot of passion for statistics and found where it fits in academia and the corporate world.
Having worked closely under the superb leadership of my predecessor Professor Inger Fabris-Rotelli, one of my aims during my two-year term as SASA President will be to minimise the gap between Statistics departments in the country and foster more collaboration among researchers in the statistics community. While the devastating COVID-19 pandemic brought several challenges, one of the best lessons learnt during the period was the virtual collaborations and webinars. The virtual platform has brought the statistics community much closer, and several collaborations have been established post-COVID-19 both nationally and internationally. The lessons learnt from the pandemic fits well to my favourite proverb which reads “When the birds learn to fly without wings, the hunter must start shooting without aiming”. In other words, this means that in times of trouble more innovative ideas emerge. It is a blessing in disguise in South Africa that we have both established universities and emerging, under-resourced and economically challenged universities. This provides an opportunity for the Statistics departments in these diverse universities to collaborate and bridge both the economic and knowledge gap between them. Indeed, there are ways to help each other out in terms of knowledge sharing, lecturing, supervision and research. As a supportive way forward some round table discussions in the form of webinars and during the SASA conferences will be organised in the coming years.
As a co-member of the Doctoral Supervisor Capacity Development in Academic Statistics in South Africa research group team spearheaded by Professor Inger Fabris-Rotelli that has been meeting since 2020 and having fruitful discussions, I would continue to encourage the interaction and transfer of skills between emerging researchers and established researchers and supervisors. It is worth noting that our statistics community has a large proportion of early career staff and emerging researchers with limited academic mentorship from senior supervisors. The SASA conference can be likened to the World Cup of Statistics where all researchers in various fields of statistics converge and share their knowledge and ideas. The future of SASA lies in encouraging the transfer of research skills from established researchers to emerging researchers through creating a platform for collaboration networks.
As a Professional Natural Scientist (Pr.Sci.Nat.) myself, I would help educate our SASA members about the role and activity of the South African Council for Natural Scientific Professions (SACNASP) in our community as a professional body. I would like to continue championing the initiative made by my predecessor through ensuring that our field is well-represented in SACNASP. This commitment would help build a symbiotic relationship between SASA and SACNASP.
The emergency of data science within our statistics community should not be seen as a threat, but an opportunity for the sustainable growth of SASA. The statistics community can embrace data science and share common interests in the same way we have embraced and lived harmoniously with applied mathematics, business analytics, computer science, engineering, and operations research, to name a few. However, it is crucial that we keep our identity as well as our core science as statisticians, without interfering or feeling threatened by our co-existence with these sister fields. The harvest field is very wide such that we can all share it and occupy our own statistics portion without any encroachment.
The field of statistics has huge potential in South Africa and abroad. I encourage all of us to punch above our weights and continue to market SASA nationally and internationally. I call upon the SASA members to come up with more special interest groups and strengthen the existing ones. Although we are heavily burdened with ponderous teaching and supervision workloads, I encourage that we continue to soldier on in research collaboration networks and attending SASA conferences annually. Indeed, we can all make a difference in the statistics community. If you think you are too small to make a difference, you haven’t spent a night with a mosquito. By crawling, a child learns to stand. Therefore, together as a team it can be done.
Yours truly,
Professor Daniel Maposa