The 54 new research chairs announced on Friday as the latest phase in the South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI) include chairs concerned with astronomy, education, health, rural development and food security and land reform. So reported National Research Foundation (NRF) deputy CEO: research and innovation support and advancement Dr Gansen Pillay at the launch of the new chairs.

One chair has been allocated to the astronomy-related sciences, to further boost South Africa's Square Kilometre Array (SKA) programme (which is part of the larger, international SKA project). This takes to ten the number of SKA-related SARChI chairs.

Four new education-related chairs have been created, taking the total to seven. Some of the new chairs will examine the challenges facing the country's higher education system. Most of the existing chairs are concerned with primary and secondary education.

Health gets 13 new chairs, doubling the total to 26. The new chairs are focused strongly on drug discovery and diagnostics (in part, in support of the recently unveiled Bio-economy Strategy) as well as health policy and rural health development.

Rural development, food security and land reform are the concern of five of the new chairs. They take the total in this field to eight.

"While it is important to steer SARChI research programmes towards national priorities and strategies, it is equally important to provide the opportunity for researchers to pursue research that may not have immediate application or fall outside the directed and thematic areas," he said. "To this end, nine research chairs from the new cohort were awarded in the open category."

The NRF received 406 submissions from 22 universities in response to its call for proposals for hosting the new chairs. There was an open and competitive process administered by a high-level independent adjudication panel. The panel selected 206 of the proposals, but there was only enough funding for 54 of them.

"[O]ne of the challenges that we are addressing is the reversal of the current situation with regard to [the] low participation of black researchers and females," affirmed Pillay.

"[T]he fact that we had 206 winning proposals of which only 54 could be funded is a strong signal that we have committed, willing and able academics and researchers who are, one, keen to contribute to the knowledge economy of our country and, two, are passionate to ensure that decision-making in government is informed by excellent evidence-based research."

Of the 150 research chairs that are currently functioning, 43 have been filled by foreigners. "Recruiting from abroad not only presents an opportunity to increase the pool of expertise and supervisory capacity, but also strengthens our international research collaborations and creates opportunities for the exchange of students and sharing of specialised research infrastructure and equipment," he averred.