Professor Ryan Blumenthal of the University of Pretoria (UP) has been honoured with the National Research Foundation (NRF) Public Engagement with Research Award in recognition of his “outstanding contributions to the public’s engagement with and understanding of science”.

What makes this award so special is that it extends beyond the honour of the accolade to cover the cost of attending the next American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference.  

The AAAS is the world’s largest multi-disciplinary science society, fulfilling its mission to advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world, and its 2024 gathering will take place in Denver, Colorado in February – with Prof Blumenthal in attendance. “This is a huge privilege,” he said.

Prof Blumenthal is a senior specialist forensic pathologist, which is a specially trained physician who examines the bodies of people who have died unexpectedly, suspiciously, or violently, and an associate professor at UP’s Department of Forensic Medicine. He received the NRF award at a glittering event at Zimbali in Durban. “It was a huge honour to be there. They treated me like a VIP. It was glitz and glamorous, and it was wonderful,” he said.

Prof Blumenthal was feted because he has popularised his profession and its impact. He has done this primarily through three mediums – books, a documentary TV series, and a YouTube channel. “Forensic pathology is not some side show,” he remarks, “it’s the main arena.”

Earlier this month Prof Blumenthal was also awarded the Absa Achiever Award 2023, in the category Absa Professional Excellence.

Not only has he published journal articles, written chapters in books, and presented papers at conferences about being a forensic pathologist, but he has written two mainstream books on the subject, both published by the prestigious Jonathan Ball Publishers. Autopsy - Life in the trenches with a forensic pathologist from Africa (2020), became a non-fiction best-seller in South Africa, making the long-list for the Sunday Times Book Awards and the short-list for the SA Booksellers Awards. It is now in its tenth print. Risking Life for Death – Lessons for the Living from the Autopsy Table, was published in August 2023, and the Sunday Times hailed it as “Written in a fresh and easy-to-read style, often laced with humour”, and said, “Blumenthal has such wide and engrossing medical knowledge it's hard to put the book down”.

Prof Blumenthal said Risking Life for Death was “my humanitarian obligation, my public health duty to the greater community of South Africa and humankind. It's all about acknowledging forensic pathology services and my duty to communicate to the public what we are seeing and what we are finding.”

UP Faculty of Health alumnus

But Prof Blumenthal didn’t stop acquiring academic qualifications when he became a specialist forensic pathologist. In 2015 he graduated with a PhD in Electrical and Information Engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), and has become well known as ‘Lightning Pathologist’, not least because it’s the title of his eight-part documentary screened on DStv in 2020, and viewed by over 2.2 million people.

He also has a YouTube Channel, Ryan Blumenthal - @AfricanForensicPathologist. Punted as “The dead have so much to teach the living. I have never turned down an opportunity to talk about forensic pathology”, it has generated more than 5 000 views since he started it in February last year. The channel features short, punchy videos. “They’re right hook, left hook, uppercut – punch,” he said, billing them as edutainment and “an entry into the field of forensic pathology for people, because they need to know what's happening”.

A UP alumnus – it is where he did his MBChB medical studies, and obtained his master’s in forensic pathology with distinction – he divides his working day between his commitments to the University and the Gauteng Department of Health.

“I have a dual post and wear two caps,” he said. He performs autopsies as part of investigating unnatural deaths. These included 32 of the Life Esidimeni autopsies when 144 people died at psychiatric facilities in 2016 after the Gauteng Department of Health terminated its contract with the private healthcare provider Life Esidimeni. He also performed seven of the Marikana massacre postmortems after the South African Police Service killed 34 striking miners at Lonmin platinum mine near Rustenburg in the North West Province on 16 August 2012. He even dealt with a death of an unnamed former president – but he is adamant that forensic pathologists treat all deaths with the same dignity and respect.

In his academic post at UP’s Faculty of Health Sciences on Prinshof Campus, he supervises postgraduate students, teaches basic traumatology to medical students, and is in charge of the forensic medicine course for public law students.

In March 2023 he was a keynote speaker at the African Society of Forensic Medicine (ASFM) conference in Kigali, Rwanda. where he won the award for Best Oral Presenter for his presentation on electrothermal injuries. Together with Dr Robert Ngude of Wits, who is the South African President of ASFM, Prof Blumenthal helped win the bid to host the international ASFM conference in South Africa in 2025. They had previously hosted the 2017 conference in Bloemfontein and this one is likely to be in Pretoria. “We are looking at between 500 to 1 000 of the top forensic minds in the world coming to South African soils and it’s my main project at the moment,” said Prof Blumenthal, ever ready to tackle the next adventure that comes his way.