Friedel Sellschop

Sellschop was Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of the Witwatersrand from 1979 to 1983. He subsequently became Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research) from 1984 to 1996. In this position, from which he retired, Sellschop assisted in creating funding policies and procedures that would ensure transparency in awarding research money.

In February 1965, Sellschop was part of a group which identified the first neutrino found in nature, in one of South Africa's gold mines. The experiment was performed in a specially prepared chamber at a depth of 3 km in the ERPM mine near Boksburg. A plaque in the main building commemorates the discovery. The experiments also implemented a primitive neutrino astronomy and looked at issues of neutrino physics and weak interactions.

Friedel Sellschop is remembered as an innovative and visionary scientific leader. He contributed both to his university and country. From 1959 to 1988, Sellschop served as the University of Witwatersrand's chair of Nuclear Physics, the first person to hold such a chair in all of South Africa. In this capacity, as a young man, he began from nothing and developed a significant nuclear physics laboratory and research department. He was therefore the founding director of the Nuclear Physics Research Unit at the University of Witwatersrand in 1956. This laboratory was later renamed the Schonland Centre for Nuclear Sciences. In 2005, the Schonland Centre was donated to the state to be run as a National Facility by iThemba LABS.

Jacques Pierre Friederich (Friedel) Sellschop (8 June 1930 – 4 August 2002) was a South African scientist and pioneer in the field of applied nuclear physics.

Sellschop was born in Luderitz, Namibia on 8 June 1930. He was educated at University of Pretoria (BSc) and Stellenbosch University (MSc), and earned a PhD in Nuclear Physics at University of Cambridge. On completing his education in England, he returned to South Africa on the advice of Basil Schonland, his mentor.