University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) academics professors Glenda Gray and Achille Mbembe have been recognised by TIME magazine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Gray, an HIV medical researcher, has made TIME magazine’s Top 100 list as one of the most influential people in the world. Wits paleoanthropologist, Professor Lee Berger, made the list in 2016. 

Mbembe, meanwhile, has been elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as a recognition of his scholarship within South Africa, the broader continent, and beyond.

Mbembe joins Wits Vice-Chancellor Adam Habib as a member of the Academy.

Gray has pioneered advances in preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV, which saves thousands of lives.

She is also the president and CEO of the South African Medical Research Council and a 2013 recipient of the Order of Mapungubwe.

Gray is an alumni of Wits Medical School and an associate professor in the School of Medicine at Wits Medical School and now directs the University’s Perinatal HIV Research Unit at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital where she is focusing on the HIV vaccine research.

Mbembe is a professor in the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research,is an A1 National Research Foundation-rated academic based on his extensive research and writing on African history and politics.
 
He was awarded a PhD in History from the Sorbonne in Paris in 1989 following his D.E.A [Diplôme d'études approfondies – postgraduate qualification] in Political Science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris.

Amongst multiple publications, his On the Postcolony was published in Paris in 2000 in French and the University of California Press published the English translation in 2001 with Wits Press publishing a new edition in 2015.