Carol Nonkwelo, who died on May 14 aged 61, was director of research & innovation support at the University of Pretoria. A self-described “small town girl” from a black community in the Eastern Cape’s East London, a devotion to public service was instilled in her from an early age by her community doctor father and her nurse mother.

Nonkwelo came of age in the volatile apartheid-era 1980s and had a strong sense of social justice and integrity. Like most educated youths she left East London to broaden her horizons, completing her bachelor’s degree in microbiology at Rhodes University, Makhanda, because it was “small, intimate, and close to home”. She had developed a strong interest from her medical parents in what caused diseases and how they spread.

Enterprising and adventurous, Nonkwelo won a scholarship — the advert of which she had seen in a local newspaper — to study in the US. This opened up the world beyond SA. She obtained a master’s in medical microbiology from Long Island University, and she talked about New York City with such nostalgia.

She completed her doctorate at Temple University, Philadelphia, gaining valuable experience through postdoctoral research at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis. She copublished four research articles on the Epstein-Barr virus.

There was no doubt about Nonkwelo returning to a recently liberated SA to contribute to transformation efforts. She worked at the Innovation Fund, the Medical Research Council (pushing for more research on public health), and the National Research Foundation, before directing research at the universities of Pretoria and Johannesburg.

In between, she found time to obtain a master’s in business administration from the University of Cape Town, to strengthen her rare combined skills in research management, fundraising and developing business plans. Always looking to improve herself, she also undertook leadership and coaching for excellence training.

Nonkwelo had always thought she would become a traditional academic, but in the end found her calling in supporting researchers, underlining her selfless and self-effacing nature.

I first met her at the University of Johannesburg, before joining her at the University of Pretoria. She had an intolerance of incompetence, pomposity and bureaucratic bean-counters, often joking — with her typically dry sense of humour — that US President Donald Trump had given too many people the false belief that they could perform beyond their capacities.

Nonkwelo described herself as an introvert who believed in “quiet leadership”. She avoided the limelight, letting others take the glory. Working long hours, she was a bridge builder who stitched together compromises. She could be firm, but never raised her voice.

She worked hard to increase external research income, promoted international and regional collaborative research to use resources more efficiently, sought to increase world-class researchers and research productivity, and was uncompromisingly committed to mentorship of postdoctoral fellows and early-career scholars. She worked closely with her university librarians to make top-notch research more widely available.

Nonkwelo loved jazz and collected CDs, talking fondly of stores in New York, Melbourne and London that still sold CDs and vinyl records. She tried to catch jazz concerts on foreign work trips and listened to music on her long drives to East London to visit family.

This cosmopolitan small town girl seamlessly bridged town and gown, interacting just as easily with ordinary folk in her beloved East London (where she was dedicated to looking after her ageing mother), as she was schmoozing with the world’s most prominent researchers and educators.

This article originally appeared in Businessday on 2 June, 2025.