PHILIP LLOYD Philip Lloyd contributed to the nation as an eminent engineer, as well as through mathematics and science education programmes for underprivileged children
Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) Energy Institute researcher, South African Academy of Engineering (SAAE) fellow, energy expert and passionate educator Professor Philip Lloyd passed away last month.
He championed the role of science and how one needs to learn the language of science – mathematics.
Lloyd was born in Sheffield, England, in 1936. As World War II gained momentum, he moved to the Peak District, where he roamed the hills and woods and played in the streams of Derbyshire. In 1946, his family moved to South Africa and he attended Western Province Preparatory School, where he earned his nickname of Taffy, his nephew Nigel Gwynne-Evans said in a tribute.
Schoolfriend and Cape naturalist Ivor Jardine described his accent when he first arrived as so thick no one could understand a word he said.
Lloyd was a graduate of the University of Cape Town (UCT), where he also obtained his master’s and doctoral degrees before spending four years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the US, undertaking advanced studies in nuclear engineering.
“He clearly mastered the language of science – mathematics – and has been described by some as a mathematical genius, which clearly gave him a tremendously strong foundation for his future career at UCT, where he received a doctorate in chemical engineering and developed a uranium extraction process which, I believe, is still in use today,” Gwynne-Evans said.
After a stint at the Atomic Energy Board of South Africa, Lloyd was director of metallurgy of the Chamber of Mines Research Organisation from 1966 to 1983. He returned to academia, where he served as a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand’s chemical engineering department from 1994 to 1999, and then as research fellow at the UCT Energy Research Centre for ten years.
From 2009 until his death, he served as a research professor at the CPUT Energy Institute. Lloyd also wrote columns for Engineering News, often highlighting significant technical engineering challenges.
“Philip contributed to the nation not only as an eminent engineer but also through many social upliftment projects, including Protec, a mathematics and science education programme for underprivileged children,” said UCT dean of engineering Professor Cyril O’Conner.
Internationally, Lloyd was actively engaged in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and, in recent years, on invitation from the International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Sciences, of which the SAAE is a member, he played a leading role on numerous international initiatives relating to energy. He was generally sceptical of the evidence that man is responsible for inducing climate change and believed that current global warming is little different to the long-term trends as evidenced in the ‘warm period’ of the Middle Ages.
He was awarded one of the Jaycees most outstanding South Africans award in 1976. In 2012, Lloyd received the Conrad Geber Award as African Intellectual of the Year and, in 2016, the prestigious and rarely awarded honorary fellowship of SAAE was bestowed on him in recognition of his significant, long-term contributions to the academy and to the engineering profession in South Africa.
“SAAE has lost a respected fellow who took great delight in sharing with others his insights and experiences in the world of science and technology, and in offering his opinions. Philip will be missed not only in South African engineering circles, but also internationally, where he had established a reputation as a global leader in the field of energy,” said O’Conner.