Nic Spaull earns recognition for research excellence

Nic Spaull, research Fellow at ReSEP, was recently announced as the winner of the Royal Society of South Africa's Meiring Naudé Medal, which is awarded annually to an outstanding early career scientist, "who have already made a mark in their field and who are poised to become scientific leaders". The adjudicators pointed out that "although he is only 34 years of age, he has had an especially prolific and influential research career to date. According to Google Scholar his h-index since 2016 is 22 and his research has been cited over 2700 times in the last five years."

Nic's research focus is inequality in South African schooling with a special emphasis on the acquisition of foundational skills related to reading, writing and mathematics. Among other projects, he has set up large-scale Randomised Control Trials in the Eastern Cape (50 schools) and Limpopo (120 schools) evaluating the impacts of teacher-coaches, workbooks and teacher assistants, and has recently helped initiate the well-publicised National Income Dynamics Study Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey (NIDS-CRAM), leading a consortium of over 30 researchers from six universities to understand the socio-economic impact of the COVID19 pandemic.

Nic was earlier this year awarded a coveted P-rating from the NRF, recently celebrated at an annual awards ceremony (read more about this here). He has also been appointed as an associate professor in the Department of Economics earlier this year. Detailed information on his research can be found on his own website.