Born profoundly deaf but with an unstoppable spirit, Trevolin Pillay is a “simple person” who is defying the odds and doing his part to unite the hearing and Deaf worlds.
Stellenbosch, South Africa (21 December 2025) – While Trevolin Pillay describes himself as “just a simple Deaf person from Chatsworth, KwaZulu-Natal”, he is also determined to break the barriers of communication between the deaf and hearing in this world.
He was born profoundly deaf, but has not allowed that to deter him or define his path to success. He was the top learner in all the grades in school and received many awards, including the DUX award.
After school, Trevolin made history as one of the first groups of six Deaf students to have completed a bachelor’s degree in IT at Belgium Campus iTversity – and the first Deaf student to achieve it magna cum laude.
Arriving at Stellenbosch University (SU) at the start of 2025, however, Trevolin found himself to be the only Deaf person around.
“My schooling and undergraduate studies were always with other Deaf students. I had to learn to adapt to this new environment. Slowly, I started enjoying being independent and roaming around the place,” he tells SU.
This week, he walked the graduation stage at SU’s December graduation ceremonies to receive his BSc Honours degree in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology – a milestone achieved through determination, excellence and intentional inclusion.
The SU staff consider working with and interacting with Trevlon as eye-opening, humbling and rewarding. As a team, they made a conscious effort to create an inclusive environment, encouraging the use of SASL apps, speech-to-text tools, WhatsApp messaging for real-time communication, and promoting SASL training.
Trevolin, who is also a member of the Deaf community in South Africa, advises Deaf students to “never give up”, even when they lose motivation for their studies.
“I was very close to quitting during the first two weeks of my studies after seeing and reading the cell biology materials. I struggled to understand the biology, especially the long and difficult words. Today I am glad that I overcame these odds and never gave up, thanks to my mentor, supervisor and co-supervisors.”
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“He played a crucial role in mentoring me to improve my bioinformatics knowledge and skills, especially some new tricky skills when it comes to coding and running the command line on the High Performance cluster”.
Trevolin encourages Deaf students to create more opportunities for deaf people in the hearing world.
“I’m just a simple Deaf person from Chatsworth, KwaZulu-Natal, who has set his eyes on accomplishing goals – this is who I am.”
Sources: Stellenbosch University
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