Prof Jean Lubuma is the Head of the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics in the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences. He received this prestigious award at the joint international congress of the American and South African Mathematical Societies in Port Elizabeth from 29 November to 3 December 2011.

SAMS describes this Award as follows: “This Award serves to recognise and stimulate excellence in research. It is only made in recognition of important research contributions to Mathematics or to the applications of Mathematics in any field. The intention of the Society is that this Award should recognise and reward substantial research carried out in South Africa, which does credit to South African Mathematics. The Award is presented in the form of a silver Möbius band with golden rim and appropriate inscription.”

Prof Lubuma enjoys considerable international recognition for his significant contribution to the understanding of domain-singularities of boundary-value problems as well as to the design of innovative and reliable finite/boundary element methods for such problems.

His current research focus area includes the mathematical epidemiology of infectious diseases of humans: modelling, simulation and applications. Over the past years he has established a good research team and network of collaborators. He is involved in several projects that have led to quality publications in terms of the relevance and depth of the problems and results.

Prof Lubuma’s work is published in excellent journals such as Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A and SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis (that are among the top journals in the field) as well as Mathematische Nachrichten, Comptes Rendus de l’ Academie des Sciences de Paris, Numerical Methods for Partial Differential Equations, Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics, Mathematical Methods in the Applied Sciences, etc. He is also very successful in publishing conference papers in prestigious series such as Pitman Research Notes in Mathematics, American Institute of Physics Conference Proceedings and Marcel-Dekker Lecture Notes in Pure and Applied Mathematics. Prof Lubuma is a Fellow of several academies including the African Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Science of South Africa.