Jat du Toit is professor of Mechanical Engineering at the North-West University. He obtained a B.Eng. (Hons.)(Civil) and a M.Eng.(Civil) from the University of Stellenbosch and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. He has published more than 100 papers in international and national journals and conference proceedings and was the co-editor of the proceedings of two conferences.

He is a registered professional engineer with practical experience in the fields of civil, mechanical, chemical and metallurgical engineering and focuses on computational fluid dynamics modelling. He is a partner of a commercial engineering software development and consulting firm.

He has also been a senior technical consultant for the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) project and serves on the editorial board of the national “R&D Journal” and the international journal “Computational Thermal Sciences”. He is a past-president of the executive committee of the South African Association for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. His is a member of the South African Institution of Civil Engineering, a member of the South African Academy for Arts and Science, a member of the European Academy of Sciences, a member of the International Association of Computational Mechanics, a member of the South African Association for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, as well as a member of the Assembly for International Heat Transfer Conferences and the Scientific Committee of the International Centre for Heat and Mass Transfer.

His current interests are the development of advanced thermal-fluid simulation models for high temperature gas-cooled nuclear reactors, the development of a multilevel solution strategy for thermal-flow problems within a systems CFD framework and the teaching and application of a new global approach to the Galerkin finite element method.