STAFF REPORTER
Professor Lunic Base Khoza has many achievements but the one that ranks higher than all of them is her success in getting students from rural communities to register for postgraduate studies and develop rare research skills.
Khoza centre of success is the University of Venda, where she has also played a big role in developing the research capacity of academic staff in the university’s School of Health Sciences. She has supervised and graduated 15 doctoral and 18 Masters students and is a National Research Foundation (NRF) C3-rated researcher with 81 peer-reviewed article publications. Khoza is a reviewer of manuscripts for both national and international journals of high scientific repute. These include Curationis, Health Gesond SA, Health Care for Women International Journal; British Journal of Applied Science & Technology and BioMed Centre Women’s Health Journal. She is currently an NRF grant-holder in the category of a competitive programme for rated researchers for the project entitled “Eye health inequalities in Limpopo Province with specific reference to cataract surgery”. She expanded her networks in this project with experts in eye epidemiology from the Netherlands and Australian universities with a view to sustaining the project beyond the NRF lifespan.
Khoza was the first Univen candidate awarded the South Africa Netherlands Programme on Alternative in Development research grant to pursue the burden of tuberculosis in the country. She has served in the International Council of Nurses and its Rural and Remote Nurses Network Core Steering Committee and has been inducted into the Hall of Fame for Research Excellence in Nursing in South Africa by the Forum of University Nursing Deans in SA in 2015. She has also been recognised for her outstanding leadership in academia by CEO Global in the categories “Lifetime Achievers and Continental Lifetime Achievers” in the “Africa’s most Influential Women in Business and Government and Titans: Building Nations Award” in 2016. In the community in which she lives her name is engraved among recognised nation-builders in the Nkuna Wall of High Achievers “Xidhlodhlo xa Hosi Muhlava 1”.
