Awards – NSTF

Announcement of Nominees
due in April 2026

Ensure that you are subscribed to the NSTF eNews to receive the notification…

Read all about the 2025 winners
in the special Mail & Guardian
supplement

2026 Special Annual Theme
Award: Healthy Ageing

For research that helps understand aging better in all its facets, and that holds the promise of improving the lives of older people, their families and communities, including homegrown technological innovations that will assist the elderly…

The National Science and Technology Forum (NSTF) Awards, in partnership with co-branding sponsor South32, recognise outstanding contributions to science, engineering, technology (SET) and innovation in South Africa (SA) by individuals, teams, partnerships and organisations since 1998. Nominees currently compete for 20 awards under 16 different categories. South32 is the co-branding sponsor for the past 11 years. As such the name of the awards is the NSTF-South32 Awards, famously known as the ‘Science Oscars’ of SA.

Deadlines and important information:

Registrations deadline closed on 29 January 2026.
Submission of nomination documents: The deadline to submit fully completed nomination documents is Thursday 5 March 2026.

Terms and Conditions:

No late submissions: The NSTF tightened up the timelines for submissions of completed nominations by the 5 March 2026 deadline. No late entries will be accepted. Extensions to the closing date will only be granted on application in writing where force majeure circumstances apply. Where, at the closing date, the number of nominations is considered by the adjudication panel to be insufficient, either overall, or in certain categories, an appropriate extension will be announced.

Today’s research … tomorrow’s innovation

What is new in the 2025/2026 round of Awards?

1. Research Software Awards (new in 2026)

The South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) joined as a sponsor to launch a new category with two awards recognising outstanding SET and innovation contributions through research software as follows:

Research Software Award – contribution that enables research through the development, maintenance or extension of research software in any scientific field, including the humanities and social sciences (HSS)
NSTF-SADiLaR Research Software Award: Human Language Technologies (HLT) – contribution that enables the processing, understanding, generation, or analysis of human language in written, spoken, or signed form

National Science and Technology Forum (NSTF)

Terms and Conditions:

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