Julie Cleverdon

Science Centre ''World Cup'' organiser

The MTN Sciencentre has appointed Julie Cleverdon as director of the popular attraction, which dominates the west end of the Canal Walk shopping mall in Cape Town and gets over 150,000 visitors a year.

Earlier this year, Cleverdon was part of the bid team which flew to the European Conference for Science Centres and Museums (ECSITE) in Portugal to ensure that South Africa could be the first country on this continent to host the sixth Science Centre World Congress in June 2011.

Cleverdon now sits on the 2011 Congress organising committee for what is considered the science centre equivalent of the rugby world cup. The MTN Sciencentre will be the host venue.

Perhaps she's been influenced by Jake White, her classmate from Lord Milner primary school in Settlers outside Bela Bela (the former Warmbaths). When White was appointed to coach the South African rugby team, in a nostalgic interview with the Limpopo newspaper Die Pos, he singled out Cleverdon as one of the few classmates he could remember from those days.

Alfred Tsipa, president of the Southern African Association of Science and Technology Education Centres (SAASTEC), said Cleverdon was due to deliver a paper on mobile science centres at their tenth annual conference at Bayworld in Port Elizabeth at the end of November, which will also see the launch of government's new Youth Into Science strategy.

''She's running one of the flagship science centres in the country,'' Tsipa said from his base at the University of Zululand science centre in Richard's Bay in KwaZulu-Natal. ''The MTN Sciencentre is a viable and commercially successful effort, and it's also highly unusual because it's been located in a shopping mall for seven years. Even overseas, I don't know of a science centre in a shopping mall but it's really practical location, it's going strong because it brings the science to the people.''

Cleverdon has also been closely involved with outreach efforts initiated by the Department of Science and Technology, including National Science Week, the annual SciFest Africa festival in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape, and branding every October as Astronomy Month.

Her adventures living in a private game park with a lesser bush baby are being worked into a children's book by The Witness journalist Sue Segar. An inveterate traveller, Cleverdon has just returned from India and has visited both Zanzibar and mainland Tanzania, Egypt, Uganda, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Namibia.

Cleverdon succeeds MTN Sciencentre founder, Professor Mike Bruton, who now works down the road in Century City at the MTE Studios, the designers of the Sultans of Science exhibit on Islamic inventors which is currently on display in the USA.

* For more information, please contact Julie Cleverdon at 083 276 9501 or 021 5298110 (switchboard 021 5298100) or email julie.cleverdon@mtnsciencentre.org.za