Dr Melody Mentz Coetzee

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Location
South Africa
University of Pretoria
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Bio

Dr Melody Mentz-Coetzee is a Visiting Fellow at Future Africa. Between 2019 and 2022 she led the Peer-learning for Emerging Researchers’ Knowledge and Advancement (PERKA) programme which aimed to develop an evidence-based understanding of the factors that enable, and the characteristics of, successful postdoctoral fellowships in Africa. She is currently the Principal Investigator for the PERKA II programme. Dr Mentz-Coetzee has worked for the past ten years as a monitoring and evaluation practitioner. She focused on theory-based mixed-methods evaluations, and the evaluation of higher education initiatives, research capacity building, and leadership in the context of development in Africa. Dr Mentz-Coetzee has recently contributed to four book chapters related to the contributions of higher education to development in Africa. She has an interest in the development and mentoring of research capacities in early career researchers. She is a former Research Fellow at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship (CAS) (University of Pretoria, South Africa). She was formerly the Strategic Learning and Impact Lead within the African Research Universities Alliance Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Food Systems (ARUA-SFS), and the monitoring and evaluation lead in the Food Systems Network for Africa (FSNet-Africa) project (www.fsnetafrica.com) – a research excellence project under the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA)-UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) partnership funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund. In 2010 she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to work and study at the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) Institute, Indiana University (Bloomington, IN, USA), which led to the completion of her PhD in Psychology.