In February 2015, Jonty Hurwitz’s sculpture “Trust” was awarded the world record for the “Smallest sculpture of a human” by the Guinness Book of Records.
Hurwitz had pioneered a new sculptural technique using multiphoton lithography and photogrammetry to create the world’s smallest human portraits, effectively nano-sculptures (see image at the end of the article). They are so tiny, that they are invisible to the human eye, and can only be observed through a non-optical method of magnification, like a scanning electron microscope. Hurwitz collaborated with a team of scientists including Stephan Hengsbach of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and Yehiam Prior of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
Andrew started his M.Sc. in Engineering at UCT in 2011, which coincided with the launch of our Radar Masters programme. Although Andrew’s research did not focus directly on Radar, he benefited from participating in some of the modules on this programme, and he has kindly agreed to be interviewed for the website.
We recently interviewed Aadil Essop, who is one of the graduates of our Radar Masters programme:
"I grew up in Johannesburg, and completed my Mechanical Engineering undergraduate degree at the Rand Afrikaans University. I attended various modules of the MEng (Radar and Electronic Defence) programme at the University of Cape Town, graduating in 2014. My supervisor was Prof Mike Inggs, and the topic of my thesis was “Electronic Attack of a Dual Band Radar”. I am currently working at Denel Land Systems, in the field of System Engineering, in Artillery Development."
As part of our ‘Meet our Alumni’ series, we interviewed Justin Abraham, who recently completed his MSc in the Radar Remote Sensing Group at the University of Cape Town.
I grew up in Johannesburg and matriculated from St Benedict’s College in Johannesburg.
Thereafter, I obtained a BSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cape Town, and then went on to complete the M Eng, specialising in Radar and Electronic Defence. This included completing a variety of radar orientated courses including clutter modelling and analysis, target tracking, radar signal processing and radar imaging.
The South African National Space Agency (SANSA) has recently completed the construction and installation of a new fully digital HF (high frequency) radar as part of their international collaboration with SuperDARN.