Africa, Change, the World
This theme was chosen and phrased as it was specifically because it is ambiguous. Presenters could interpret the theme with or without one or both of the commas, giving different interpretations. Essentially the talks were about Africans making a change for the better in the wold.

Durban
South Africa

Kumi Naidoo

Born in South Africa, Kumi Naidoo became involved in his country's liberation struggle at the age of 15. In 1986, he was arrested and charged for violating the state of emergency regulations. He went underground for one year before fleeing into exile in England where he was a Rhodes scholar and earned a doctorate in political sociology. From 1998 to 2008, Kumi was the Secretary General and Chief Executive Officer of CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, which is dedicated to strengthening citizen action and civil society throughout the world. He was also founding chair of the Global Campaign Against Poverty (GCAP), served as a board member of the Association for Women's Rights in Development and in 2003 was appointed by the former Secretary General of the United Nations to the Eminent Persons Panel on UN Civil Society Relations.Kumi serves as Chair of the civil society alliance 'Global Campaign for Climate Action' (GCCA), of which Greenpeace was a founding member. Kumi became Executive Director, Greenpeace International on November 15, 2009.

Patrick Bond

Professor Patrick Bond is senior professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Development Studies in Durban, South Africa, where since 2004 he has directed the Centre for Civil Society. His work presently covers environment (energy, water and climate change), economic crisis, social mobilization, public policy and geopolitics. Amongst fifteen authored or coedited books are: Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society (2009); Looting Africa (2006); Talk Left, Walk Right (2006); and Elite Transition (2005). He was a founding member of the Durban Group for Climate Justice and is active in Climate Justice Now!'s South Africa branch. In service to the new South African government from 1994-2002, Patrick authored/edited more than a dozen policy papers, including the Reconstruction and Development Programme. He has lectured at more than 50 universities across the world. Patrick earned his doctorate in economic geography under the supervision of David Harvey at Johns Hopkins in 1993. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1961 and has lived in South Africa since 1990.

Yashik Singh

Yashik Singh is a lecturer at the School of Information Systems and Technology, and at the Department of Telehealth, Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine, University of KwaZulu-Natal. His interests lie in applying the concepts of artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, electronic medical records, decision support systems, and management information systems to the domain of HIV and HIV drug resistance.s

Kriben Pillay

Academic, Actor, Author and director of the Leadership Center, UKZN

Joseph Jere

Joseph Ntabeni Jere graduated from the CISCO academy in 2006 as a Cisco certified networking associate (CCNA) from the University of Zambia. He also holds a B.Sc HONS from the University of Greenwich in the United Kingdom (2005). He worked for Omni Africa as technical consultant on a number of copper mining projects. Currently he is doing a masters degree by research focusing on deployment strategies of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) in rural KwaZulu-Natal.

Brett van Niekerk

Brett graduated with a M.Sc. Electronic Engineering in 2006 at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He is currently completing his PhD research analysing vulnerabilities in communication infrastructures from Information Warfare and Electronic Warfare perspectives.

Shamim Bodhanya

Shamim is a graduate of the University of Natal, and of Nyenrode University in the Netherlands. He is based at the Leadership Centre and draws on inter-disciplinary research to work with complex real world problems. Shamim serves as a Director of the Institute for Natural Resources.

Rosemary Quilling

Rosemary Quilling is a Senior Lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, in the School of Information Systems & Technology. She is one of the founders of the NextEd programme, which seeks to facilitate the development of a worldwide virtual collaborative educational network. Current focus of NextEd is on connecting African faculty and students globally. The role of technology in education, team dynamics and online culture are keen areas of interest. She can also be located as RoseQ (twitter) and Resomyra Felwitch (Second Life).

Craig Blewett

Craig Blewett is a Senior Lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, in the School of Information Systems & Technology. Craig has a keen interest in the convergence of educational theory and technological platforms. He is one of the founders of the NextEd programme, which seeks to facilitate the development of a worldwide virtual collaborative educational network. There is little doubt that Web 2.0 environments will be used more and more for education in the future; therefore Craig is spending increasing amounts of his time engaging students in these virtual environments through a variety of avatars including Cee Beattie (Second Life) and klihk (twitter).

Suria Govender

Speech and Drama Professor at University of KwaZulu-Natal, an Inter-cultural dance practitioner, an artistic director of Surialanga Dance Company and Dancelink, and an Executive member of Sankofa African Renaissance Development

Paul Kelly

Programme Director at Africaid's WhizzKids United. His major goal in life is to have helped decrease the spread of HIV/AIDS in KZN by 2015

Eugene Chetty

Innovation and web 2.0 specialist at a large private bank.

Deena Govender

School principal at the V N Naik School for the Deaf

Murray Legg

Murray has enjoyed a vastly varied few years in the professional arena after qualifying as an Mechanical Engineer. Biomedical engineering captured his attention led to three years of biomedical product design. His interests include fly fishing, mountain biking and travel.

Harsha Desai

Harsha Desai is pursuing research in Medical informatics. She is currently working as a Process Analyst at a private bank.

Imtiaaz Sooliman

Dr. Imtiaz Ismail Sooliman qualified as a medical doctor at University of Natal Medical School in 1984. On 06 August 1992 founded Gift of the Givers Foundation; In a 17 year period developed the organisation into one of the most respected international humanitarian agencies

Adriaan Ryan

Adrian has been a lecturer in Classics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and curator of its Museum of Classical Archaeology since 2001. He holds a PhD in Classical Archaeology. His research interest is in Athenian painted pottery, and particularly, in the use of computers to study these artifacts.

Francesco Petruccione

Francesco Petruccione was born in 1961 in Genova (Italy). He studied Physics at the University of Freiburg i. Br. and received his PhD in 1988. He got his "Habilitation" (Dr. rer. nat. habil.) from the same University in 1994 and worked there as Associate Professor of Theoretical Physics until 2003. In 2004 he was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Prof. Petruccione has been working on the theory of open quantum systems, which is at the basis of many recent quantum technological applications.