Steve Sherman Steve Sherman, the chief imagination officer of Living Maths, has dedicated his career to instilling young students with a love for STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and maths) subjects. He believes this will inspire more graduates to pursue careers in fields such as engineering and programming. Sherman teaches thousands of students weekly around the world, including at the Museum of Mathematics in New York, looks for new ways to open schools and students to opportunities that would normally be financially out of their reach, and has 1 200 educators on the Facebook group he created for educators to share resources and ideas. “As a Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert, Kahoot Ambassador, Wakelet Ambassador, among many other EdTech roles, I have run many global collaboration events online to bring educators together,” says the 52-yearold Sherman, the 2020 recipient of the Global Teacher Award. The COVID-19 pandemic presented Sherman, a Herzlia and University of Cape Town alumnus, with his biggest challenge. “When the lockdown took place, I was instantly ‘unemployed’. I couldn’t go into classrooms, run workshops, travel, or be around people. Fortunately, problem-solving is what I do for a living, and technology is one of my strong points.” He turned everything online, and reached 3 000 students worldwide. “Despite the realisation that financially, COVID-19 could have devastated me, I focused on what I could control and made sure to master it.” Sherman, who loves what he does and does what he loves, counts the following among his achievements over the past 30 years: pupils from his outreach project making the Western Cape’s top-50 list for maths; and his hosting of an astronaut in South Africa in front of 10 000 people and more than 40 million people digitally. “An outreach officer for the Humans to Mars Summit in the United States and an international teacher liaison with the Space Foundation, I run an annual space tour where I bring astronauts and experts in the space industry to South Africa, and we visit schools and offer public talks so that young people can get access to these incredible role models.” Sherman says he experiences life-changing moments every day, whether it’s doing volunteer work for Reach for a Dream and realising the fragility and brevity of life, or watching a student who was written off by their teachers and family achieve above and beyond what was expected because they felt I believed in them.” Sherman’s family are his “why”. “It’s about being a positive role model for my daughters,” says this photography enthusiast. “I want my children to be inspired to help others.” He advises young STEAM professionals to “get busy doing what makes you happy. Don’t be afraid to take on challenges. Climb out of your comfort zone, and say yes more often.” Benjamin Rosman, a professor in the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), has a passion for creating spaces for others to excel. This 38-year-old Crawford College alumnus has is working with robotics; autonomous intelligence and learning (RAIL); the Deep Learning Indaba; Lelapa; and the Wits Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery (MIND) Institute. “The fact that many of my colleagues are excelling in ways that people weren’t before these spaces existed is evidence that I have made an impact on the computer science environment at Wits, and the AI (artificial intelligence) culture more broadly,” Rosman said. Through Lelapa, for instance, Rosman has helped to “make sure there are exciting tech positions in South Africa so that we don’t lose all of our best graduates abroad”. Rosman’s biggest challenge was having a stroke before he was born, which left him with cerebral palsy and partial paralysis on the right side of his body. “It has made many things difficult for me throughout my life, from sport at school, even to typing, but it has also taught me the value of playing to your strengths.” Rosman has a Master of Sciences (MSc) degree and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in AI and robotics from Edinburgh University. “I had to go abroad to do that. Since then, I vowed to do whatever I could to ensure that no-one would ever have to leave the country to acquire those skills again.” In 2014, he took on a visiting lecturership in the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Wits. “That slowly pivoted to become my focus, culminating in me being made full professor in 2022. “My work at Wits has largely involved establishing and growing its RAIL laboratory. This is now the largest collection of AI researchers in Africa.” While working at Wits, Rosman has supervised 26 PhDs and 58 MSc students. “In addition to eight of my students having positions at Wits, others have gone on to hold positions at organisations such as IBM,” he said. He has also taught more than 300 students a year, including in specialist topics at Masters level, which he introduced into the syllabus, and has worked with a senior team to establish MIND, “the only AI Institute in Africa to focus on fundamental rather than applied research”, said Rosman, who was named a National Geographic Explorer in 2024 for a project on robots in the Sterkfontein Caves. In 2017, he and seven colleagues founded a movement called the Deep Learning Indaba, the largest such summer school in the world. This was first held at Wits and went on to be held in other African countries. Through the IndabaX programme, “we support locally run events in other countries. In 2024, we have run these technical machine learning events in 47 African countries. Our movement has inspired similar movements on other continents,” said Rosman, who enjoys spending time with his wife, painting, and drawing. Daniel Schay City of Johannesburg Ward Councillor Daniel Schay wakes up every morning knowing he has to confront a behemoth of a city struggling to deliver. “It’s a task I think most people would deem impossible,” says this 36-year-old Democratic Alliance (DA) member and King David Linksfield alumnus, “but I know that with determination and the power of our community, we can deliver change.” Schay, who previously volunteered for the DA in positions including deputy chairperson of the party’s Youth Johannesburg, pushes every day for more accountability and action among the city’s officials as he knows jobs will be created and educational opportunities will blossom if the city moves in the right direction. He believes he has made an impact by introducing a new level of transparency and accountability between the community of Ward 72 and its local government councillor. In the past few years, “I have stood resolutely and publicly against ineffective governance in Johannesburg; I’ve developed new methodologies to hold government officials to account; and by standing up publicly as a Zionist Jew, I’ve given strength to our community to be proud of their beliefs and values.” Schay said his greatest achievement as a local councillor was his daily councillor message, which connects more than 4 500 people daily with what’s happening in Johannesburg and the rest of the country. He describes this as “a massively successful innovation that has generated far greater political awareness within South Africa’s Jewish community”. Schay, who has volunteered for organisations like the South African Union of Jewish Students and Bnei Akiva, experienced a lifechanging moment while on tour to Poland in high school. “I was standing in the gas chambers at Majdanek,” he said. “I thought, ‘According to all logical considerations, Jews shouldn’t exist anymore, yet here we are after thousands of years of discrimination, of exile, of murder.’ I concluded that being Jewish is more than a mere accident of birth. Being Jewish means you have been put on this earth by G-d to fulfil a mission, and that means embracing our beliefs and never being ashamed of them for an instant.” Schay, who has two engineering-related degrees from the University of South Africa, had 10 years of experience in the structural engineering field prior to becoming Ward 72 councillor. Over the past few years, he has shifted completely from engineering to politics. “While I still view my role as a problem solver, the problems are different and a whole lot bigger. It has forced me to consult far more than I ever did previously, to be open to criticism, and course correction, and to embrace the power of our community. I used to work from 08:00 to 17:00. Now I work from 07:00 to 22:00 and even longer. Frankly, I’ve never been happier.” He enjoys hiking and reading, but says his key to maintaining balance is Shabbat and the time it gives him to switch off and be with family. Professor Benjamin Rosman Absa Professional Excellence Award Nominees
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