Celebrating our students during Women's Month and for International Youth Day: Cynthia Mapendere

Posted on August 06, 2021

August is a special month in South Africa. On 9 August we celebrate Women's Day. On 12 August we celebrate International Youth Day. To highlight our young talent during the month of celebrating women, we have decided to showcase a female student from each of our streams during the month of August. Our first feature focuses on Cynthia Mapendere, from our environmental stream.

An exceptional student, Cynthia has overcome many challenges. Irrespective of the challenges she has faced, Cynthia has remained focused on her studies and now she holds an MSc Environmental Ecology. Furthermore, she is currently pursuing a PhD in Zoology with the Department of Zoology and Entomology.

She takes interest in wild-domestic interface dynamics and transboundary animal diseases particularly, African swine fever virus. During her Masters program, she looked at the ecology of wild and domestic suids in relation to the epidemiology of African swine fever and foot-and-mouth disease in northern KwaZulu Natal adjacent to communal areas. Her findings from the research have been published on Transboundary and Emerging diseases journal (https://doi.org/10.1111/tbed.14090). Below are some pictures of Cynthia in the field.

We are proud to have Cynthia as a student on our Department and the Centre for Environmental Studies , and look forward to continue working with her. For more on our previous post about Women’s Day please click here. Information on International Youth Day can be found here.


- Author Department of Geography, Geoinformatics and Meteorology

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