CAREER FEATURE01 August 2025An astronomy conference changed the course of Brenda Namumba’s career and taught her the importance of networks.BySarah Wild0Sarah WildSarah Wild is a freelance journalist in Canterbury, UK.View author publicationsSearch author on: PubMed Google ScholarBrenda Namumba, shown receiving her PhD, would not have switched from teaching in a secondary school to become an astronomer without the scholarships and encouragement she received. Credit: Brenda NamumbaRadioastronomy in AfricaIn 2005, when South Africa and its partner countries in Africa submitted a proposal to host the world’s largest radio telescope, called the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the continent had five radioastronomers, all based in South Africa. That year, the country embarked on a targeted human-capital-development programme to develop the talent needed to build, operate and use radio telescopes, which collect radio signals emitted by celestial objects. Marking its 20th anniversary this year, the government-funded programme has created 5 research chair positions and more than 1,370 scholarships for undergraduate, master’s, doctoral and postdoctoral studies — at a total cost of about 500 million rand (US$28 million).Now, the SKA is under construction. It will have more than 100,000 tree-like antennas in Australia and almost 200 dish antennas in South Africa. South Africa owns and operates several radio telescopes, and there are hundreds of radioastronomers and radioastronomy students at African universities and institutions.Nature’s careers team spoke to officials and scientists working to boost Africa’s radioastronomy capacity, in part through the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory. In the last of a short series of articles investigating the growth of the discipline on the continent, Brenda Namumba, who was the first woman to receive a doctorate in astrophysics in Zambia, talks about how networks built her career.I only found out about astronomy back in 2009, as an undergraduate studying physics, when I happened to attend an international conference on space science and astronomy at the University of Zambia in Lusaka. That was the first time I heard about young people studying space science and astronomy at the master’s or PhD level. Back then, I had not even met anyone from Zambia doing a master’s in physics.At the meeting, I interacted with established scholars and graduate students, who told me about their research and what they wanted to do in future. We kept in touch and some of them helped me to apply for scholarships and explained how to write a personal statement.‘I didn’t know someone could pursue astronomy as a career’The conference made me decide to further my studies, and I applied for many scholarships while working as a secondary-school physics and mathematics teacher. Eventually, in 2012, I was accepted into South Africa’s National Astrophysics and Space Science Programme (NASSP) as an honours undergraduate student at the University of Cape Town (UCT). This scholarship programme, established in 2003, has supported more than 300 honours-degree students and more than 140 master’s candidates.Diverse astronomyThe programme introduced me to the idea that astronomers can make use of a range of electromagnetic wavelengths. In 2012, there was a lot of talk about the exciting science that was going to happen with the SKA. That was the year when it was decided to split the telescope between South Africa and Australia. South Africa had built the 7-dish KAT-7 radio telescope, which was the test bed for its 64-dish MeerKAT radio telescope that will eventually form part of the SKA. I wanted to be at the forefront of answering some of the interesting questions that these radio instruments would make it possible to tackle.One topic in particular caught my attention. During my honour’s degree, I took a course in extragalactic astronomy in which the lecturer (who later became my PhD supervisor) talked about dwarf galaxies. At the time, they hadn’t been explored in much detail with optical telescopes because they are faint and difficult to detect, and the situation was even worse at radio wavelengths. But, the new generation of instruments, such as KAT-7, was better suited to exploring their structure and properties to understand galaxy evolution. The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) funded my master’s degree at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban in 2013, my doctorate at the UCT in 2015, and then my first postdoc at Rhodes University in Makhanda from 2019 to 2022.The power of networksSARAO gave me this great opportunity, and it wasn’t solely about my academic qualifications. I’ve been able to attend conferences around the world, which have given me a different mindset concerning how people do research, and also confidence in presenting my work. For example, at the SARAO Postgraduate and Postdoctoral Research Conference, the organizers, who include SARAO staff and researchers from universities across South Africa, guide us in how to present our work and interact with colleagues and experts.doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-02222-5 Developing astronomers in Africa: ‘We wanted to create a discipline’ ‘I didn’t know someone could pursue astronomy as a career’ Giant radio telescope was ‘a natural magnet’ for African talentSubjectsCareersAstronomy and astrophysicsEducationLatest on:Jobs Associate or Senior Editor, Nature Communications (Engineering and Infrastructure)Job Title: Associate or Senior Editor, Nature Communications (Engineering and Infrastructure) Locations: Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing, New York, Phil...Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing, New York, Philadelphia, Jersey City, Madrid, or MilanSpringer Nature LtdDirector Position, Institute of Molecular Biology, Academia SinicaThe Director is initially appointed for a three-year term, renewable for a second term, and concurrently holds the title of Research Fellow.128 Academia Road, Section 2, Nankang, Taipei 115, TaiwanInstitute of Molecular Biology, Academia SinicaSeeking Excellent Young Scientists Fund (overseas) and academic positions at all levelsSeeking Excellent Young Scientists Fund (overseas), Full Professors, Associate Professors, Assistant Professors, Postdoctoral Associate.Beijing (CN)State Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Materials and Devices at the Institute of Semiconductors, CAS