ASSAf annually awards ASSAf Science-for-Society Gold Medals for outstanding achievement in scientific thinking to the benefit of society. This year the awards were presented to physician-scientist, Professor Linda-Gail Bekker, and palaeoanthropologist, Professor Lee Berger.

Professor Linda-Gail Bekker is an outstanding South African physician-scientist who has made major contributions to the prevention and treatment of HIV and tuberculosis. As deputy director, she co-leads the University of Cape Town’s Desmond Tutu HIV Centre with her husband and scientific collaborator, Professor Robin Wood. This centre, which has a 450-person strong research team, is internationally renowned for its contributions to tuberculosis and HIV research in South Africa.

She is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Cape Town and served as the President of the International AIDS Society until recently. Professor Bekker has published over 350 peer-reviewed journal articles that have garnered over 14 000 citations, several of which are in high impact journals such as Science, The Lancet, and The Journal of Infectious Diseases.

While her research interests are in HIV and tuberculosis, her passion is the research she undertakes with young people. Within the field of HIV, her studies have included approaches to the scale-up of antiretroviral therapy as well as the prevention of HIV in women, youth and men who have sex with men. Professor Bekker is deeply committed to improving healthcare services for the poor, which has been evident right from her early research.  She has made substantial contributions to creating several HIV treatment and prevention centres in the community of Cape Town that primarily serve vulnerable and marginalised populations.

Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf)

ASSAf was inaugurated in May 1996. It was formed in response to the need for an Academy of Science consonant with the dawn of democracy in South Africa: activist in its mission of using science and scholarship for the benefit of society, with a mandate encompassing all scholarly disciplines that use an open-minded and evidence-based approach to build knowledge.

ASSAf thus adopted in its name the term 'science' in the singular as reflecting a common way of enquiring rather than an aggregation of different disciplines. Its Members are elected on the basis of a combination of two principal criteria, academic excellence and significant contributions to society. 

The Parliament of South Africa passed the Academy of Science of South Africa Act (Act 67 of 2001), which came into force on 15 May 2002. This made ASSAf the only academy of science in South Africa officially recognised by government and representing the country in the international community of science academies and elsewhere.