Prof. Yali Woyessa is the Assistant Dean for Research, Innovation and Engagement at the Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment, and Information Technology.

He joined CUT in April 2003 as a post-doctoral fellow, to develop a research proposal and secure funding in the then School of Civil Engineering and Built Environment of the then Technikon Free State.

After serving three years as a post-doctoral fellow, he was appointed as a researcher for a brief three-month period followed by his employment as a permanent academic staff at the rank of a lecturer in July 2006.

His main area of specialisation is water resources management, specifically dealing with catchment management and hydrological modelling to understand the impact of humans and the environment on water resources. Five years ago, he won the prestigious Fulbright Scholar Award- a flagship tenable program tenable at prestigious US universities.

“With this award, I spent six months at the University of Minnesota in the USA, where I was exposed to a new area of research on water resources management such as modelling the impact of climate change on water resources availability. Since then, I am very much involved in this area of research, and I have successfully supervised three doctoral students each at CUT, UFS, and UJ respectively, and have generated several publication outputs in high-impact journals, such as the Journal of Hydrology by Elsevier with Impact Factor of 6.708 and Site Score of 9.1.”

He has been actively involved in research on water and contributed to CUT’s nomination by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) to be part of the BRICS-Network University in one of the six thematic areas, namely, Water Resources and Pollution Treatment.

“Subsequently, I was nominated by DHET to represent CUT in the International Thematic Group (ITG) as an expert in this field. The ITG group is currently busy with a book project, entitled, BRICS Countries: Sustainable water resource management and pollution control - challenges and Opportunities, in which I have a book chapter contribution, titled: Sustainable Management of water resources in a semi-arid river Basin under climate change: a case study in South Africa.”

He said that his decision to join the university at the time was purely by a stroke of luck and since joining CUT, he has grown from strength to strength in all spheres of his life and never looked anywhere else. “My career at CUT helped me provide my beautiful daughter with the best education overseas where she currently works for one of the big banks in Canada. So, my career at CUT has transformed my life and my family’s life from good to great. CUT has provided an enabling environment where everyone has an opportunity to express their potential for growth, and I can say that I am a living testament to that.”

Prof. Woyesa said that one of the advantages of working in a university environment is to always continue learning and improving yourself. After joining CUT as a permanent employee, he obtained two more master’s degrees MA in Higher Education and MBA, all with CUT’s support and enablement. “I am always in a continuous mode of improving myself, gaining new knowledge, unlearning old ones, and relearning to get perfect in what I do.”

He concluded with a quote from Alvin Toffler which says, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”