The award was presented by the Honourable Minister of Science and Technology, Ms Naledi Pandor, at the NSTF-BHP Billiton Awards gala dinner (the 14th annual event of this kind) held in Gauteng on 21 June 2012.

Prof Eloff is a very deserving recipient of this prestigious award. His achievement in research capacity development can be ascribed to the successful supervision of 27 MSc and 22 PhD students during the past 10 years. Most (84%) of the students were black and the majority (82%) of the MSc students passed with distinction.

The Phytomedicine Programme is a multidisciplinary and collaborative research programme investigating therapeutically useful compounds present in plants growing in South Africa. The programme was started in 1995 in the Department of Pharmacology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Pretoria by Prof Eloff. It was transferred to the Department of Paraclinical Sciences at the Faculty of Veterinary Science in 2002.