Super Specialist Dr. Sipho Mfolozi
Super Specialist Dr. Sipho Mfolozi - Brief Background
I was born in Umtata (now Mthatha), the then capital town of Transkei. I grew up in a rural nursing-college hospital in Flagstaff with my mother (a nurse who was a tutor) and my siblings. I was a curious child about nature, science and technology, and often asked my mother questions about how things worked or why they worked the way they did. I loved watching documentaries and reading National Geographic books. I firmly believed that one day I’d be an astronaut and go to the moon, or at least be fighter-jet pilot. The epic 1980s film THE RIGHT STUFF left an indelible impression on me. Later I became fascinated with astronomy, astrophysics and quantum physics, because these subject seek to understand “the whole system”.
However, carrier exposure and opportunities for black children in rural apartheid homelands in the 1980s were limited. The quality of education itself left much to be desired. The first school I attended was a mud school, with a cow-dung smeared floor. We sat on opened cut board boxes and learnt to write on granite writing slates (tablets) with detachable wooden edges. Chalk to write with was for teacher only, so the wooden edges came off and one took a bite off the corner of the slate and used the bitten-off piece to write with. The slates lasted a few months. The next class up was in the same room, and our teacher would instruct us not to listen to what they were being taught. There was no running water, electricity or flushing toilets. One time, the school washed away in heavy rains (rains of 1987), and we took classes under a tree. The first time I went to a school with flushing toilets I was 15 years old (Standard 8, grade 10). By age of 9 years I knew I wanted to be a doctor, having grown up surrounded by doctors and nurses. If that didn’t work out, I wanted to be an architect or painter.
I completed my matric in 1994 and went to study medicine at UCT the following year. For the first three years I lived in Smuts Hall, and for the remainder of my studies, I lived in Medical Residence at Medical Campus in Observatory. I did my internship and community service years at the East London Hospital Complex (Frere and Cecilia Makiwane Hospitals). In 2004 I went to work in the United Kingdom as a resident medical officer, spending a few months as a ship’s doctor on a cruise liner in the Caribbean Sea. I returned to South Africa in 2006. I started working in the Department of Forensic Medicine at UCT as a medical officer in 2007, then took up a specialist-training post the following year. I became a qualified forensic pathologist, obtaining a Fellowship in 2011and a Master’s degree (MMed) in 2013. My Master’s dissertation was based on a device I invented in 2009 for estimating the postmortem interval. In 2009 I used the invention to enter the UCT NIC Business Plan competition, in which I won first prize, and later won 2nd prize in its national phase in 2020.
In 2014 I enrolled for a PhD in Forensic Pathology, continuing my work from the Master’s degree. I had learnt that heat transfer was a mechanical engineering subject, and sought my supervisors in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UCT, where I met Prof A. Malan and T. Bello-Ochende. In 2018 I was appointed the Head of Department of Forensic Medicine at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. After an eventful examination period over 2 years, I was eventually awarded the PhD and graduated in July 2021.