DSFSI Autumn 2025 Graduations: Celebrating Growth, Collaboration, and Impact

Celebrating Our DSFSI Autumn 2025 Graduates — A Community of Growth and Collaboration

The Autumn 2025 graduation season at the University of Pretoria once again provided us with a moment to pause, reflect, and celebrate the achievements of members of the Data Science for Social Impact (DSFSI) Research Group and our extended community. These moments remind us that while degrees are awarded individually, they are achieved within a rich ecosystem of mentorship, collaboration, and support.

At DSFSI, we take pride not only in those directly supervised within our group, but also in the broader environment we create: one where students, teaching assistants, research assistants, postgraduates, and collaborators across disciplines and faculties come together to build knowledge at the intersection of data science, AI, and societal impact.

This season, we are proud to highlight and celebrate the following (just a sample of many) graduates who have been part of our community in various ways:

PhD Graduate

Dr. Tsosheletso Chidi
Thesis Title: Representations of Homosexuality in Indigenous African Languages: An Analysis of Selected Fictional Literary Works by Black Writers

“I would like to give special thanks to the Mellon Foundation Scholarship and my PhD supervisor. My future plans include blending research, literature, and community engagement to build platforms for underrepresented voices. I’m excited to expand the Dirurubele-Wandering Butterflies writing mentorship programme, contribute to multilingual technologies through my postdoctoral work, and hopefully shape future policies and curricula that center indigenous knowledge and inclusivity.”

While Dr. Chidi was not supervised directly under DSFSI, we celebrate her as a valued new DSFSI Fellow and a contributor to our growing transdisciplinary community that spans AI, language, and social impact.

Masters Graduates

Miehleketo Mathebula
Dissertation Title: From Text Annotation to an Auto-Regressive Language Model for Sentiment Analysis in South African Financial Reviews

Tsholofelo Gomba
Dissertation Title: Assessing Interpretability in Machine Translation Models for Low-Resource Languages

Both Miehleketo and Tsholofelo have made important research contributions in advancing African language processing and developing responsible, explainable NLP systems for low-resource contexts — areas central to DSFSI’s ongoing mission.

Honours Graduates

Isheanesu Joseph Dzingirai

“I’m grateful to the DSFSI research group and my supervisor, Prof. Vukosi Marivate, for their support and assistance during my honours degree. I’m excited to keep on working with them as I pursue my Master’s (and possibly PhD) and keep learning and growing through the research group.”

Makungumixo Ndlovu

“I would like to acknowledge my supervisor Mrs Seani Rananga, Mr. Thapelo Sindane, Mr. Miehleketo Mathebula, Dr. Anna Bosman, and the support I had from many more members from the DSFSI community. In the near future, I plan to pursue MIT in Big Data Science at the University of Pretoria. One day, I see myself working as a Data Analyst, helping businesses and organizations make better decisions using data.”

Undergraduate Graduates

Andinda Bakainaga

“DSFSI helped me want to carry on with my studies for honours. Just want to also thank my mom and friends.”

Unarine Netshifhefhe

A Collaborative Effort Beyond Supervision

Many of these graduates have engaged with DSFSI in multiple ways: as Research Assistants, Teaching Assistants, interns, collaborators, and participants in our workshops and projects. We also gratefully acknowledge the diverse teams of supervisors and mentors from across departments and faculties at the University of Pretoria who work with us to build an interdisciplinary and vibrant research environment. This collaborative spirit is core to our vision of data science for social impact.

We are proud of each and every one of you — your hard work, resilience, and contributions to the DSFSI community are inspiring. You carry forward not only your degrees but also the ethos of using data science to serve society.

We look forward to seeing what the future holds for you — whether continuing with research, entering industry, or contributing to new fields of knowledge.