Elected: 2018
Country (Nationality)
South Africa
Discipline
Chemical Sciences
Bio
Professor Naidoo completed his PhD at the University of Michigan (USA) in 1994 after which he spent two years as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University (USA). He joined the faculty at the University of Cape Town (UCT) as lecturer in Chemistry in 1996 and was inaugurated as Professor of Physical Chemistry in 2011.
In recognition of his expertise in computational science as it is practiced in chemistry, chemical physics and biochemistry Kevin Naidoo was awarded one of the first of 21 South African research Chairs (SARChI) in 2007 for a period of five years in Scientific Computing, twice renewed for 2012-2016 and 2017-2021. He played a pivotal role in the establishment of South Africa’s only Centre for High Performance Computing, of which he served as the acting research director 2006-2007. As founding director of the Scientific Computing Research Unit at UCT he established the only South African postgraduate programmes awarding M.Sc.’s and PhD’s in Computational Science.
His depth and breadth of expertise is internationally sought after as seen from his editorial board membership of the Journal of Computational Chemistry (Wiley, 2004 -), Carbohydrate Research (Elsevier, 2015-) and the Journal of Molecular Modeling (Springer, 2018-). He is regularly invited to review research proposals for major international science and funding agencies such as the ACS’ Petroleum Research Fund, the Czech Academy of Sciences, Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.
Professor Naidoo’s principal scientific interests are the development and application of computational tools for the life sciences with a special focus on cancer diagnostics and therapeutics. As a testament to his breadth and depth of expertise he is most probably the only theoretical chemist to lead a clinical investigation to establish a genetic biomarker for Breast Cancer as discovered by Big Data Analytics.