Dalia Saad

Dalia Saad is a trained environmental chemist, an educator and a researcher.

Dalia holds a BSc (Honours) in Chemistry from the University of Khartoum in Sudan (2006), an MSC (2011), and a PhD (2013) in environmental chemistry from the University of the Witwatersrand.

She is currently a researcher and a Royal Society FLAIR Fellow at the School of Chemistry at Wits. Before joining Wits in 2021, she worked at various institutions on a full-time and research-visits basis (Khartoum University in Sudan, the University of Johannesburg and UNISA in South Africa, and the International Water Management Institute in Sri Lanka).

Dalia`s research interest is promoting access to clean water, namely, materials development for wastewater treatment (polymeric materials, bio-adsorbents, and nanomaterials), emerging pollutants, and resource recovery and reuse. She is also interested in the social aspects of water management and the safe reuse of recycled water. With generous funding from the Royal Society, UK, she leads a research group investigating microplastic pollution in African freshwaters. Her research has gained national and international recognition and media attention.

Dalia has completed several international pieces of training and received various international awards and numerous research and mobility grants from several organisations, including The Royal Society – UK, Royal Society of Chemistry, Robert Bosch Stiftung, the African Academy of Sciences, and the Organisation for Women in Science in the Developing counties (OWSD), among others. Dalia is a FLAIR-Royal Society Fellow, Africa Science Leadership Program Fellow, TWAS Young Affiliate, and an alumna of the OWSD fellowship programme. She is a member of several professional bodies, a former member of the executive committee of OWSD - South Africa national chapter, and the founder of OWSD - Sudan national chapter.