Jonathan D. Jansen

Jonathan D. Jansen is a distinguished professor of education at Stellenbosch University and president of the Academy of Science of South Africa. He was a high school biology teacher in Vredenburg and District Six and spent the rest of his career in university teaching and leadership around South Africa. In addition to his work in changing schools, he leads a major project on behalf of the Minister of Higher Education that prepares promising young academics from the 26 public universities for the professoriate.

His research is broadly concerned with the politics of knowledge, as laid out in his award-winning book, Knowledge in the blood. His other books include Leading for Change, As by fire: The end of the South African university and Now that I know, a book on South African families who were separated by the racial laws of the 1950s.

In 2013, Professor Jansen was awarded the Lifetime Achiever Award for Africa at the Education Africa Global Awards in New York, as well as the University of California's Spendlove Award for his contribution to tolerance, democracy, and human rights. The next year, he won the Nayef Al Rodhan Prize from the British Academy for the Social Sciences and Humanities for his book Knowledge in the Blood. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in 2016-17. He currently serves as the president of both the South African Institute of Race Relations and the South African Academy of Science.

He completed his BSc at the University of the Western Cape and his teaching credentials at Unisa before doing an MS at Cornell University and a PhD at Stanford University.