(Published - 22 July 2019)
Professor Priscilla Baker recently earned a Paris Seine Fellow-in-Residence research fellowship to be hosted at Cergy-Pontoise University in France, under the Paris-Seine Initiative in excellence. Cergy-Pontoise University is a leading centre of teaching and research in the Academy of Versailles, with 17,700 students and 1,500 international students.
“My residency at Cergy-Pontoise University will serve to consolidate the collaborative partnership and expand it from the UWC chemistry department level to a university-wide partnership, by identifying complementarity amongst faculties and programmes,” she said.
Professor Baker is an internationally-recognised specialist in analytical electrochemistry at UWC’s Faculty of Natural Science. She is also the co-leader of SensorLab, an electrochemistry research platform focusing on the fundamental and applied electrodynamics of materials and sensors, and is a recipient of the national prestigious DST Distinguished Woman Scientist Award.
“I have been collaborating with the University of Cergy-Pontoise for the past seven years as visiting professor to teach a course in Electrochemical Sensors to Master’s students in polymer chemistry. The collaboration has grown over the years to include student and staff mobility between the two universities, joint degree registrations and joint publications, and has strongly advanced the institutional mandate for internationalisation,” she explained.
Next month Professor Baker will host the 5th International Symposium on Electrochemistry Symposium on Electrochemistry of the South African Chemical Institute (SACI) entitled Electrochemistry at Nanostructured Interfaces from the 11th to the 14th of August 2019 at UWC. Traditionally, these symposia bring together multi-disciplinary scientists focusing on aspects of their research that involve electrochemistry for analysis, characterisation, synthesis or application, and that serve to foster extensive scientific interaction across disciplines in a very applied manner.
Prof Baker has served as chairperson of the Electrochemistry division of SACI (2006-2018), and during this time the International Symposium on Electrochemistry series was launched, with the first symposium taking place at UWC in the UWC auditorium in 2008.
Internationally, she has served as the regional representative of the International Society of Electrochemistry (ISE Switzerland) since 2016, and has served on many international organising committees, linking the South African electrochemistry community to this global platform.
