Page 57 - DUT Annual Report 2020

A number of interventions and incentives for NRF- rated researchers are being instituted to ensure that we are proactively creating an enabling environment and retaining the best talent that we have. The Gender Justice, Health and Human Development Research Focus Area headed by Professor Cheryl Potgieter launched the University’s Research and Doctoral Leadership Academy (RADLA) in June 2020. In 2020 RADLA had 66 members, hosted three workshops, and assisted nine academics to submit applications for NRF rating.
Attracting talent and retaining the best staff are key to ensuring that our capacity continues to grow. Through capacity building programmes like RADLA we are mentoring and preparing identified researchers for NRF ratings. The NRF Grant award to DUT will help focus on preparing women researchers for NRF rating. Applicants are taken through mock ratings, assisted in establishing Research Focus Areas over a 3-year cycle, and guided on focusing on the key elements that will strengthen their rating application from a scholarly point of view.
STAFF QUALIFICATIONS
The University has been making a determined effort over the past few years to ensure that any new instructional/ research staff who are appointed have doctoral
qualifications, and to encourage existing staff to improve their qualifications to doctoral level. The proportion of instructional/research staff with doctoral qualifications increased marginally, from 30% in 2019 to 31.4% in 2020. This improvement stems from several support initiatives for staff to obtain their doctoral qualifications, including doctoral mentorship programmes and research methodology and supervision workshops.
With the exception of the Faculty of Arts and Design, there was an increase in the number of staff with doctoral qualifications between 2019 and 2020. The biggest improvement was observed in the Faculty of Accounting and Informatics (33%). In 2020 the Faculty of Applied Sciences had the highest number of staff with doctoral qualifications (47), followed by the Faculty of Management Sciences (43).
Figure 26 compares the number of staff with doctoral qualifications to the number of doctoral graduates per year for the 2015 – 2020 period. Compared to 2019, the number of staff with doctoral qualifications increased by 9% and the number of doctoral graduates increased by 33%. Figure 27 shows that the ‘productivity’ in terms of the number of doctoral students graduated per instructional/research staff with a doctoral qualification has increased from 0.233 in 2019 to 0.284 in 2020.
Figure 26. Staff with doctorates and doctoral graduates, 2015 – 2020
DURBAN UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY ANNUAL REPORT 2020
250
200
150
100
50 0
125
134 140
179
65
193
45
211
60
29 40 33
2015 2016 2017 Staff with doctorates
2018 2019 2020 Doctoral Graduates
55