Delecia makes history as South Africa’s first Einstein Fellow! She’ll spend the programme conducting her research in Germany while she boards in the garden cottage at Einstein’s former summer home!
Cape Town, South Africa (20 August 2026) – Stellenbosch University academic Delecia Davids has made history as the first South African selected for the prestigious Einstein Fellowship.
The fully funded fellowship is offered by the Einstein Forum and the Wittenstein Foundation. It gives young academics under the age of 30 the opportunity to step outside their usual field and explore an interdisciplinary project, following Albert Einstein’s own wide-ranging approach to ideas.
The fellowship is granted once a year, and only to one person.
Davids will spend her fellowship living and working in the garden cottage at Einstein’s own former summer home in Caputh, Germany.
As per Stellenbosch University, Davids is currently an early-career researcher, lecturer and teacher educator at the university, where she works in the Department of Curriculum Studies.
Davids grew up in Delft and began started her studies at Stellenbosch University in 2012. She initially planned to become a maths and science teacher, but her interest later moved towards teacher education. She realised that working with future teachers could extend her impact to all the learners they would one day teach.
Her fellowship project is titled ‘Reparative storytelling, memory, and identity’ and it will move her work into a deeply personal area. Davids will examine the stories of people who identify as coloured in South Africa.
It grew out of personal loss after her father’s death in 2023, which led her to explore family and community histories that are often left unasked.
“I realised there was so much I didn’t know about him and his history and where he came from,” she says. “You don’t really ask until it’s too late.” she says, as per SU.
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The fellowship will take Davids into questions of memory and identity, but her current research is focused on an entirely different realm where education meets technology.
Her PhD, now in its final stages, looks at trainee teachers (students about to finish their teaching degree) and how they think about and use technology. She wants to understand why they see technology the way they do – what in their lives shaped those views.
The university has also credited her for revolutionising education by introducing game-based learning and assessments as alternatives to standardised assessments. Davids designed digital escape rooms specifically for the education field that incorporate elements like timers, puzzles, collaboration, clues, and locks to create engaging tests.
Davids is also the founder and academic lead of Stellenbosch University’s Digital Agency Studio, where students, academics and young people examine how technology shapes learning. She is also the curator of TEDx Stellenbosch!
Being chosen for the Einstein Fellowship is a big first for South Africa and an incredible achievement. While she’s in Caputh, Davids will have time and space to dig up stories that might have otherwise been forgotten, and to think about how telling these stories can help families better understand who they are.
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