“South Africa has amazing process control engineers and domain knowledge within this field – I’m able to make a significant worldwide contribution because we have such a good name in this area,” says Prof Derik le Roux of UP’s Department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering. He chats about his career trajectory and why he believes that South Africans are more valuable than a multitude of resources.

rofessor Derik le Roux has a relatively rare trajectory. Focused and unwavering, from the moment he entered the University of Pretoria (UP) to study electronic engineering, he just didn’t stop. One degree followed the other and by the age of 29, he graduated with a PhD.

It appears he just got caught up in his studies.

“There was always more to consider, more to understand and to know, and I had a really good supervisor who was also a very good mentor, Prof Ian Craig – now we work in the same research group,” Prof Le Roux says of his colleague in UP’s Department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology.

His academic career has had a similar meteoric progression.

By the time he did honours, he was already a temporary part-time junior lecturer, which became permanent and full-time by the time he’d started his master’s degree. Six months after completing that degree, Prof Le Roux was promoted to lecturer. And a mere two years after attaining his doctorate, he was promoted to senior lecturer. Four years later, he was Associate Professor Le Roux. He is pretty matter-of-fact about it all.

“There was a position open as a junior lecturer in the department and that enabled me to fund my studies because I didn't have another way. Then I sort of moved up the ranks.”

He says he thought he would re-evaluate the option of joining industry after his doctorate: “But once I got there, I realised that the academic environment actually suits my personality. There are a lot of advantages to it, and I enjoy it.”

The biggest plus about academia for Prof Le Roux is research. He is inquisitive about understanding how things work, and enjoys finding novel solutions to problems

“It's about the desire to know a bit more, and not necessarily have to do the same mechanical task over and over again,” he says.

He enjoys teaching too, especially “interacting with people on a one-to-one level”.

Prof Le Roux has a calm exterior that belies his action-packed academic duties and home life. He casually remarks that he was in Sweden last week, but is adamant that he won’t be dashing off again too soon.

“It’s not fair on my wife (a chartered accountant) for me to travel all the time,” says the father of three young children.

Prof Le Roux is busy. He has his workload at UP where, besides his research, he teaches three courses – two undergraduate and one postgraduate – and has a current supervision load of six master’s and four doctoral students. He also plays an active role in the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC). This international organisation has 49 national members, each representing the engineering and scientific societies concerned with automatic control in its own country.

And Prof Le Roux is right in the thick of its workings. He holds two positions in the IFAC: he is the social media liaison for its technical board (even though his own social media profile is limited to LinkedIn) – which includes being involved in the digitisation of its services – and is a member of its publication board. In fact, his recent visit to Sweden combined research and an IFAC council meeting.

He has three big events coming up that he is also assisting with: he is a technical committee member for Mintek@90, the November conference celebrating the legacy of South Africa’s national mineral research organisation; and is co-chair of the International Programme Committees for both the Control Conference Africa taking place in Mauritius in September and the Mathematical Modelling Conference in Vienna, Austria in February 2025.

Prof Le Roux is very much a product of Pretoria, having obtained all of his degrees at UP as well as having attended Afrikaans Hoër Seunskool. But his outlook on process control, the field in which he designs advanced control strategies to resolve impediments in the mineral processing industry, is anything but insular. One of the stand-out features of his career thus far is his extensive collaborations worldwide with researchers in countries such as China, Chile, the UK, Norway, Austria, India and Finland.

“My research plays to the strength of South Africa,” he says. “We have amazing process control engineers and domain knowledge within this field. I am able to make a significant worldwide contribution because we have such a good name in this area. 

“I realise that Europe and other first-world countries have more resources, but the natural motto of South Africans of ‘’n boer maak ’n plan’ is what makes us so valuable. South African engineers, especially in terms of process control, are highly sought after.”

Prof Le Roux chose electronic engineering as a career because it is about problem-solving.

“I always enjoyed maths and how it relates to the real world, and I am very curious. The application of mathematics to solve problems is about wanting to understand how the world works, and whether or not you can explain or describe it. That's always intrigued me.”

His choice of career has paid off, though he does admit this: “The more I know, the more I don’t know enough; I find that satisfying. There’s always something new and different to learn.”