Professor Sonali Das has an inventive strategy that she employs when applying for anything: she inverts the requirement of making sure she ticks all the boxes, and asks: “How can my proposal fail? How can I be rejected?” Then she focuses on making sure she ticks those boxes too.

Being upfront and tactical in this manner has stood her in good stead. Prof Das was promoted to a full professor in business management in January. This is just short of five years after joining the University of Pretoria’s (UP) Department of Business Management in the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences, her first full-time university position.

She used her special strategy to plan her transition to academia from being a principal researcher at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).

“I started asking people, ‘If I applied to academia in South Africa, how could I be rejected?’ One thing I was told very early on is that you should have a National Research Foundation [NRF] rating.”

Then she reached out to universities for visiting positions.

“Wits University offered me a visiting associate professorship, while Nelson Mandela University made me a research associate to be the main supervisor of my first PhD student,” Prof Das recalls. “So I was quite alert about the road to academia, and took pre-emptive steps towards that.”

Her latest NRF rating is C2, recognising her as an established researcher. But ratings are no longer an inherent goal for her.

“It’s what I tell my PhD students who ask how to get a PhD. I say, ‘You do your research; the PhD will be a natural consequence. The system wants me to apply for an NRF rating; I apply. I'm not doing research for the rating. The rating will happen as a natural consequence.”

For Prof Das, the “huge privilege of being in academia” is the opportunity to indulge in blue sky research, where real-world applications are not immediately apparent. She relishes being able to explore ideas without having to link it to billing a client.

“One can look out of the window and reflect for as long as necessary about a problem, whether we solve it or just understand it better,” she says.

Her research areas are diverse. Prof Das has explored everything from the price of housing in South Africa to focusing on Cape fynbos as a means of fire management in Mediterranean-climate shrublands. Last year, she led a project on artificial intelligence and climate change information needs in Africa that was funded by Google to the tune of $20 000.

“Some people will say, ‘I work in this area; that’s my calling, and that’s where I start and finish.’ I am not like that. Although I’m a statistician, what intrigues me is a problem,” she says, outlining her approach: “I want to convince myself that it is indeed a problem. Why is it a problem? Who does it matter to? What kind of data is associated with this problem? That data and the process of data collection should point me to a certain statistical methodology to propose a solution.”

Prof Das is particularly fascinated by the latest problems she is researching. She is working with Dr Najmeh Nakhaei Rad of UP’s Department of Statistics to predict the direction of seasonal extreme wind speed. And with Prof David Ríos Insua of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (ICMAT) in Madrid, Spain, she is using adversarial risk analysis to determine the optimal time to launch a product.

Prof Das met Prof Insua as part of the senior research fellowship she was awarded by the Spanish Women for Africa Foundation. Their Science by Women Programme collaborates with Spanish institutions, and Prof Das worked at ICMAT after spending a few months at the Basque Centre for Applied Mathematics in Bilbao.

In July Prof Das, Prof Insua and another co-author presented an invited paper at the International Society of Bayesian Analysis in Venice, Italy. And in June, Prof Das and other co-authors presented another invited paper at the International Nonparametric Statistics Symposium in Braga, Portugal.

Internationalism is a key focus of Prof Das’s career. Not only is she an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, but she is on its committee that selects others to achieve that status. She is a council member of the International Society for Business and Industrial Statistics, and an associate editor of its official journal. And she is a global mentor for the Master in Business Analytics and Big Data programme at the IE School of Science and Technology in Madrid.

Prof Das attributes these pivotal roles to arriving in South Africa as a foreigner. She is originally from India and did her doctorate at the University of Connecticut in the US, where she met her husband, Rangan Gupta, then also a PhD student, but in economics. Now they are both full professors at UP.

“I was absolutely new to South Africa, and I think I made an effort to be visible and approach people,” Prof Das recalls. “I was also very curious. I knew nothing about South Africa in terms of its academic vastness; that made me ask questions that I probably would never have asked if I were South African. But I could ask those questions as a neutral third party, an external person.

“As a result, I built networks and connections with people. That’s how, very slowly, these relationships grew. Not because I’m smart or because I’ve been seen on the cover of a magazine – although I have been on the cover of the South African Journal of Science [Vol 115 No. 3/4 in 2019]. No, it was because of these relationships that were built over many, many years with a variety of people.”

Prof Das plays her part for women in science. In 2018, she chaired the second international Women in Science without Borders conference in Johannesburg, yet says she doesn’t think being a woman has played a role in her own career.

“I don’t think I have been very conscious of being a woman in my field. If you talk to men, they will say they are also discriminated against somewhere, somehow. Discrimination exists wherever you are, right? It exists in science, in some disciplines more than others.

“There are a lot of women in statistics, locally and internationally. And I want to believe that we are not discriminated against on the grounds of being women. But if we are, I want to believe that because we have the numbers, it is easier to discuss such issues in our field. For example, increasingly at both local and international conferences in statistics, efforts are being made to ensure that there is some form of child-care facility for those who may need it.”

Outside of her professional life, Prof Das is also an active researcher – of world cuisines and recipes.

“I think I'm one of the better and evolved cooks in Pretoria. Nobody declines an invitation to our house. We have a small group of close friends, and we all enjoy eating and discussing food. I will ask, ‘What can I cook for you?’ And if you say, for instance, Vietnamese food, then I make it a mission for weeks to do research on it so that what I cook is authentic and special.”