Professor AJ Smit credits his father, a career civil servant, for his love of science which started at their home in Pretoria - a house filled with books on all manner of subjects.

“There were always books around, books about nature - all kinds of aspects about nature, plants, animals, and dinosaurs, and there were atlases and there were encyclopaedias and so on.

“They were the staple of my growing up, and being taken to a library every week. In those days, to get to a library my mother used to get into a car and drive there, maybe 15 kilometres and then 15 kilometres back to get to a book. Nowadays, students have all of that information that I craved back then, on their phones,” said Prof Smit.

Image: Shelley Christians/UWC

On Wednesday, Prof Smit will deliver his inaugural lecture, titled: Between Two Oceans: Currents, Climate, and the Future of South Africa’s Coasts.

After matriculating, he pursued his higher education at the University of Port Elizabeth, now known as Nelson Mandela University. There, he completed his undergraduate BSc degree, followed by his Honours and Master's. His academic journey culminated with a PhD from the University of Cape Town.

“In high school, I was not necessarily interested in marine biology. I didn't even think that biology is something that people classify into different spheres or discrete units of separate study,” said Prof Smit.

In Grade 11, he became interested in studying either Zoology/Botany when he was looking at his post-matric options. However, it was only after browsing through university brochures that he realised that Zoology and Botany are two separate fields of study. 

He says it was at the end of his third year at UPE when things changed for him. “I had a professor, Professor Bruce Robertson, and somehow, he must have seen something in me.”

From Smit’s third-year class, consisting of 12 students, Prof Robertson asked him to work for him during the December/January break, writing a review on the chemical constituents of seaweeds in South Africa. He took the job and has never looked back.

“It's just simply because of being in the right place. It's really serendipitous. I must have done something that I was not aware of during my undergrad that caused me to be noticed by someone.

“And that's what I always tell students, also today. How do you become effective and stand out in your class? So I'm gonna do something different; don't be average. Be more than average so that there's something that's going to draw your professor’s attention to you. You want to be different from the people around you. Maybe I was,” says Prof Smit.

On the subject of his work as a marine biologist, Prof Smit said he recently completed work on a project which focused on extreme events in the Benguela upwelling system, which, he said, also allowed them to understand physical infrastructure, ecosystems and people.

“The ecosystems that have to thrive on the coast of South Africa are vulnerable to extreme heat coming onto the coast from time to time. And that can cause mass mortalities that can reduce productivity of fisheries, resources, and result in less access to these resources by people,” said Prof Smit. 

He highlighted the crucial need for comprehensive studies encompassing South Africa's broader climatic and oceanographic environment. He added that within this context, various ecosystems in South Africa are vital for supporting people's livelihoods.

“So there are three different levels at which we need to study. ?We need to understand people's experiences, the changing ecosystems, and how the changing ecosystems are being affected by far broader scale global phenomena, including climate change and all the reasons for those kinds of things,” said Prof Smit.

Scientists, he said, need to understand people’s experiences with changing ecosystems and how these changes are, on a broader scale, affecting phenomena like climate change. 
Since 2014, Prof Smit has secured more than R28.74 million in research funding, and he says it's all about using creativity in the process of writing proposals. 

“I find the process of writing proposals probably one of the more interesting aspects of the scientific process, because it's at this proposal writing stage where ideas come to mind. 

“That is an area in your research where you have free creativity around imagining different ways of doing things, of recognising why similar attempts to try and do the same thing in the past have failed, and what you are going to do differently this time.

“It's just an opportunity for creativity, and I think that creative way of unpacking a complex scientific problem in a way that makes it seem that I had fun doing so, makes it evident to the reviewers that I have thought deeply about this, and I've thought about it in ways that perhaps other people have not been able to before. But I think very much central to the whole thing is my ability to always think across that trans-disciplinary space, all the way from the very distal drivers to the proximal consequences, to people who benefit from it,” said Prof Smit.