Kerstin Jordaan is a full professor in the Department of Decision Sciences at the University of South Africa as well as the part-time executive director of the South African Mathematics Foundation. She served the academic community as president of the South African Mathematical Society from 2016 to 2019. She is a NRF rated researcher and the recipient of a Royal Society Newton Advanced Fellowship for her research in Special Functions and Orthogonal Polynomials. Currently she is the convenor of the National Research Foundation specialist committee for Mathematical Sciences.

Kerstin completed her BSc and Higher Education Diploma, majoring in Mathematics and Geography, at the University of Pretoria. She then completed an Honours degree in Mathematics Education at the University of the Witwatersrand and became a mathematics teacher at Pretoria High School for Girls. She returned to the University of Pretoria to complete a master’s in mathematics and, following a break from formal employment while her children were small, a PhD in mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand.

She is married with two adult sons. When she is not doing mathematics, she enjoys baking, reading and spending time in the outdoors.