The 2025 Chronicle

St Michael Awardees Christopher (Kit) Vaughan (left) and Vincent Craig Carruthers

raphy. This book won the prestigious UCT book award in 2010, and Kit donated the prize money to the Allan Cormack Book Fund, set up by Allan’s family to benefit impecunious science students at UCT. In 1984 the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) established a system to rate South African research ers, and in the inaugural year Kit received the P rating, a President’s Award for Young Researchers. Twenty years later, in 2004, he was awarded an A rating, recognising him as be ing among “researchers who are unequivocally recognised by their peers as leading international scholars in their field for the high quality and impact of their recent research out puts”. Kit was subsequently commissioned by the National Research Foundation to write a book which he titled On the Shoulders of Oldenburg , with the subtitle A Biography of the Academic Rating System in South Africa , that was published in 2015. It might well be asked whether Kit has any time for anything but work. However, he is a dedicated family man and has been married to a wonderful wife, Joan, since 1977. He has two much-loved children, Bronwyn, who trained as a primary school teacher, and Gareth, who spent a post-matric year at Michael house in 2001 before earning an honours degree in English lit erature at UCT. Gareth edited Kit’s biography of Allan Cormack

national universities and has been the keynote speaker at six international conferences and symposiums. One of these was in Zurich in 2001, when he spoke about his theories of human gait – resulting in a highly cited paper – and complet ed a two-year term as president of the International Society of Biomechanics. One of Kit’s lesser-known commitments has been the role he has played in the governance of UCT. It is well known that, over the past few years, the university has encountered signif icant problems with regard to its strategic direction and gov ernance. Kit, together with a number of his colleagues, has made his views well known and taken a principled stance un der difficult circumstances. During this critical time he twice served as a member of the executive council and the senate executive committee. Kit has been a prolific author. In total, he has authored and co-authored 10 books, contributed 12 book chapters and pub lished more than 100 journal articles. His book Dynamics of Human Gait has become a standard reference for students in this field. One book that he has written is of a different genre, in that it is a biography of UCT alumnus Allan Cormack. Titled Imagining the Elephant , Kit describes the life and vital work of Allan, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his pioneering contribution to the development of computer tomog

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