To add to Prof Don Cowan's accomplishments on the 6th of June 2018 he achieved his 300th publication. The paper titled “Temporal shifts of fungal communities in the rhizosphere and on tubers in potato fields” was accepted by the journal of Fungal Biology. Achieving 300 publications is a truly great accomplishment among scientists and we are very happy to congratulate Prof. Don Cowan in his accomplishment.

Prof Don Cowan began his science carrier as an enzymologist and graduated from the University of Waikato, New Zealand, in 1981. After a period of postdoctoral research, he took up a tenured lectureship in the department of biochemistry and molecular biology at University College London in 1985. He moved to South Africa in 2001 to take the Chair of Microbiology at the University of the Western Cape, where he established and directed the Institute for Microbial Biotechnology and Metagenomics. In 2012 he took the position as Director of both the institutional Research Theme in Genomics and the newly formed Centre for Microbial Ecology and Genomics (CMEG) at the University of Pretoria.

He has accumulated many accomplishments throughout his carrier. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa and a Member of the Academy of Sciences of South Africa. He was awarded UWC Vice-Rector’s Award for research excellence and SASM Silver Medal for Exceptional, Meritorious and original research in microbiology, he was elected as an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and he was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal at the University of Pretoria. He is also the immediate past-President of the Royal Society of South Africa and an NRF A-rated researcher.