Wits to host Tobias Plenary Lecture
PARKTOWN – The University of the Witwatersrand's Faculty of Health Sciences will host its Biennial Research Day and Post-graduate Expo.
This meeting of academic excellence, to be held on 17 September, is intended to bring together researchers and students in the field of health sciences to present their research papers, and engage in discussions covering a variety of relevant topics.
This year the Research Day will host the inaugural Phillip V Tobias Plenary Lecture in celebration of his remarkable life.
Emeritus Professor Phillip Tobias, who died in 2012, was internationally renowned for his dedication to a better understanding of the origin, behaviour and survival of humanity; for his many major scholarly contributions to anatomy, human biology, palaeoanthropology, cultural anthropology, the evolution of the brain, cytogenetics and the history and philosophy of science.
Tobias had a long and illustrious career of over 50 years at Wits and has inspired generations of medical and science students. In continuation of Tobias’ legacy, the lecture by Professor Bernard Wood is fittingly entitled, Reconstructing human evolution history.
Wood is the University Professor of Human Origins at George Washington University and adjunct senior scientist at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. He is also currently the director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of Hominid Paleobiology and the editor of the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Human Evolution.
