‘Maseka Lesaoana joined the University of Limpopo (UL) as Senior Lecturer in the Department of Statistics and Operations Research (SAOR) in February 2003, where she became Head of the Department and later Director of the School of the Mathematical and Computer Sciences. She was a full-time Research Professor since mid-2014 and retired in December 2019. Her research interests are in applied statistics and operations research. She has successfully supervised and mentored several postgraduate students in both statistics and operations research and has established collaboration with several scholars regionally and globally. She is currently with UL on a contract basis since retirement.

‘Maseka obtained her Doctorate in Operations Research from the University of Southampton, UK (1991) on a UN Scholarship, and a Master of Mathematics (MMath) degree in operations research and statistics from the University of Waterloo, Canada (1985) on a CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) Scholarship. She started her career in academia as a teaching assistant in the Department of Statistics at the National University of Lesotho (NUL) in 1981. She joined the Human Sciences Research Council in 1994 to establish the South African Data Archive; and the National Department of Labour in 1999 to establish the Labour Market Information and Statistics Unit. She taught at NUL; on a part-time basis at the then Technikon South Africa (which has been incorporated into the University of South Africa); at UL; and at the MBA programme attached to UL.

Since 2017, ‘Maseka has been a member of the National Research Foundation’s Strategy and Steering Committee of the newly established National Graduate Academy for the Mathematical and Statistical Sciences in South Africa. She was a member of the Statistics Council of Statistics South Africa (2000-2018). In 2018, she resumed membership of the Umalusi Assessment and Standardisation Committee (that she had left in 2009). She is a member of both the South African Statistical Association (SASA) and the Operations Research Society of South Africa (ORSSA). She was the Vice-President and President of SASA in 2019 and 2020, respectively.