Ambassadors

Ambassadors serve as community builders, making connections between people and resources. Ambassadors will be senior strategic individuals within their local institution and will be supported by a project manager where necessary.

Typical Ambassador activities will include:

  • Hosting awareness sessions for their local institution’s researchers, educators, students, scholars and administrators.
  • Meeting with individuals and educating faculty on their campuses who are eager to learn more.
  • Establishing and managing partnerships with faculty on-campus.
  • Learning from peers by participating in periodic face-to-face meetings and at conferences.
  • Sharing information with other Ambassadors.
  • Leading the integration of instruments, sensors, shared computational resources, and data repositories at their local institution.
  • Plan and submit funding requests.
  • Connect Cirrus with useful resources and helpful people on their campus.
  • Point interested individuals toward services and resources available at Cirrus.
  • Working with the Cirrus Assistantship program on the analysis of supply and demand, to identify what is required to meet future needs.
  • Lead the development of key communities of practice, including connections with international communities and initiatives.

The appointment of Ambassadors to establish on campus expertise will ensure:

  • Greater visibility for the institution’s research activities.
  • Synergy between projects.
  • Provision of expertise that is otherwise difficult for individual projects to obtain.
  • Lower learning curves.
  • Improved retention of top-quality researchers by providing opportunities to collaborate on ground-breaking projects.

    Contact Us

    Emeritus Professor Barry Dwolatzky
    Membership.AIAfrica@wits.ac.za

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