Shadrack Mkansi

Mr Shadrack Mkansi is a science awareness platforms manager at the South African Agency for Science and Technology Advancement (SAASTA). SAASTA is the business unit of the National Research Foundation (NRF) in South Africa.

Before joining SAASTA, Shadrack was a science communicator at the Giyani Science Centre, a computer science and mathematics subject advisor and an examiner for Additional Mathematics. He was also a part time programming lecturer for UNISA.

He was an African coordinator for two Horizon2020 projects NUCLEUS and RRING. These projects were a collaboration of 14 and 20 countries respectively. He manages the country’s National Science Week funded by the Department of Science and Innovation (DSI), a network of about 35 science centres in South Africa and national science festivals.

He is the co-author of the book, “Communicating Science: A Global Perspective”. He contributed in the South African chapter, “South Africa Science Communication throughout turbulent times”.

He co-presented with Wellcome Trust in Turkey, PCST in 2016; Japan, Tokyo in the Science Centre World Summit (SCWS) in 2018; and online in 2021 Wellcome Trust Masterclass. In these mentioned conferences I presented with presenters from UK, Ireland, Germany, and Australia.  Amongst others, I presented papers in Europe, China, Japan, various parts of Africa, and USA.