Dr Belinda Stapelberg completed all her undergraduate and post-graduate degrees in Applied Mathematics at the University of Pretoria. She obtained her PhD at the University of Pretoria at the start of 2018.  For all her post-graduate studies, Dr Stapelberg was able to obtain NRF scholarships. During the rest of 2018 she completed a post-doctoral fellowship funded by the CoE-MaSS, at the University of Pretoria. In 2019 she completed a second post-doctoral fellowship at the University of South Africa. She was appointed as lecturer at the University of Pretoria in the department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics in February 2020.

During her appointment so far, Dr Stapelberg has taught courses on Dynamical Systems, Continuum Mechanics and Numerical Analysis, all which integrate well into her current research.

Dr Stapelberg’s research fields of interest include the Finite Element Method, Partial Differential Equations and Numerical Approximation, specifically concerning problems of hyperbolic type (such as the wave equation). Her PhD thesis focused on convergence and existence theory of a general linear vibration problem. The 2018 post-doctoral fellowship continued with this research.

In her 2019 post-doctoral fellowship at the University of South Africa, Dr Stapelberg broadened her research interests to include Reinforcement Learning, a branch of Machine Learning. Some work was published during the tenure of the fellowship and is currently a secondary research interest.

Dr Stapelberg is currently working on research regarding the vibration of vertical slender structures (such as cell-phone towers or industrial chimneys). The research is multi-disciplinary in nature due to its direct applicability to engineering problems.