Professor Paul Sumner from the University of Fort Hare will be giving the keynote address at our 2023 conference on 29 September. He will be talking on 'Rock weathering: on trends and tenets – a southern African perspective'.

​

Bio

​

After completing high school in Eshowe, Paul Sumner studied for a BSc with majors in geography and chemistry at the University of Natal. An H.D.E. followed, also on the Pietermaritzburg campus, then Honours and the MSc degree in geography. Captured by university life, Paul took his first post as a temporary lecturer at the University of Fort Hare where he stayed for two years and then moved to a lectureship at the University of Pretoria in 1997. Paul was drawn to the mountains and worked on footpath erosion in the Drakensberg for the master’s, and later on palaeo-landforms in Lesotho for the PhD at the University of Pretoria. Not afraid to digress, Paul also had an interest in rock weathering processes and studied these on Marion Island and in the Drakensberg. After working with colleagues and postgraduates in the sub-Antarctic, his interest shifted to more tropical climes where he co-led studies on erosion phenomena on Mauritius. He returned to the University of Fort Hare (UFH) in 2019, where SAAG celebrated three decades at the biennial event in that year. Paul has graduated 30 masters and doctoral candidates and published 54 journal articles. He is now Professor and HoD of the department of Geography and Environmental Studies at UFH and holds a C rating with the NRF.