Valuable astronomy work undertaken by Herts PhD student in Botswana
She is the first in Botswana to graduate from a doctorate in astrophysics
A recent graduate from the University of Hertfordshire is involved in a government project to create Botswana's first ever radio observatory.
Dr Kushatha Ntwaetsile, from Tsamaya in Botswana, studied computer science before following a basic training in radio astronomy in South Africa.
From there, she travelled to the UK to study astrophysics at the University of Hertfordshire, from which she graduated with a PhD, the first ever person from her country to obtain a doctorate in the field.
Dr Ntwaetsile said: "Soon astronomy will have this massive dataset that will be coming from telescopes, so that's when I realised that as a computer science person, I can actually come in and build algorithms for for astronomers to actually be able to process the data."
Since finishing her course, Kush has returned home to work on the Square Kilometre Array project, SKA/AVN Botswana project – a project which consists of a team of innovators with a range of skills from several different fields, with the ultimate objective to build the first radio observatory in Botswana.
She said: "A lot of people don't even know what astronomy's all about here, so it was an aim of coming in and driving this project, which was initiative by the government, to to develop astronomy in Botswana."
"Being part of this project, we do development of astronomy, we do outreach to school kids, to the community, so that we just raise awareness about about astronomy."
" We are hopeful that at the end of this year, we'll start the building of Botswana's first radio telescope, and what's most interesting is we are we are a team of young people so it's actually nice to be part of the team that is tasked with developing astronomy in Botswana."
While she juggled motherhood and faced several large challenges throughout her years of education, Dr Ntwaetsile successfully graduated from her doctorate in Astrophysics, specialising in creating models or algorithms that can be used for data analysis, becoming not only the first in her country to obtain a PhD in the field, but the first woman to do so too.