Sa-aadat Parker

Sa-aadat Parker matriculated from Wynberg Boys' Highschool in 1998. He completed a BSc in Materials Engineering from UCT in 2002, receiving the class medal and being on the Deans' Merit list each year it was available. In his final year, he received the Cape Town Corporation Silver Gilt Medal and South African Society for Mining and Metallurgy Prestige Award for being the top Materials Engineering student. He also completed a major in Mathematics simultaneously with his BSc degree. Sa-aadat then completed an MSc in materials engineering from the same institution in 2005. Following graduation, he worked at AAT Composites as a materials engineer specialising in composite material testing and analysis. In 2011 he then worked at the University of Stellenbosch as a senior lecturer in Mechanical engineering. His research focus was the numerical optimisation of composite structures. After four years, he moved to the University of Cape Town and continued researching composites. In 2022 he changed his research focus to work on the layering of glass under blast loading and registered for a PhD at UCT under the supervision of Prof. Gerald Nurick and Prof Steeve Chung Kim Yuen. The glass layering involves comparing monolithic glass, laminated glass and double glazing. Laminated glass is two glass layers separated by a polymer interlayer, and double glazing is two layers of glass laminated or monolithic separated by an air gap.