The cosmologist-potter using AI to fight superbugs

The cosmologist-potter using AI to fight superbugs

13 March 2026 - Wits University

Distinguished Professor Bruce Bassett's cosmic journey to Wits to join the "leading AI research group in the country".

It's just past 10:30 and the Wits Club at Wits University is a buzz of activity. Not a robot in sight (yet) as waiters scurry to prepare for the lunch rush hour. The last bastion? Maybe not.

Sitting down, there is always something uniquely human about humans: surprise.

Physicist, cosmologist, mathematician, statistician, data scientist, artificial intelligence researcher and… potter. Only seven of the many ways to describe Distinguished Professor Bruce Bassett.

He smiles shyly as he opens his Instagram profile on request. Check out cosmo.bruce and you'll settle the argument: AI is NOT stealing creativity. A scrolling delight follows, showcasing magnificently intricate ceramic and wood-turning artworks, hinting at his insatiable love of 'wonder'.

Though a highly regarded scientist, the artist in him still 'survives as fun', he quips.

"My sanity is my ceramics. I just love making things. I don't take it too seriously; I purposefully keep it amateurish. Academics spend so much time just thinking and everything is abstract. To do something physical with your hands is very grounding."

Joining Wits University last year as a Distinguished Professor in the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics (Faculty of Science), Bassett keeps his childhood passion alive. As a young boy, he was set on doing a fine arts major. Then, at 15, his dad popped a book in his hand: Physics and Philosophy by Sir James Jeans, and Bassett was hooked. Physics opened a whole new dimension for his creativity.

"This was a pivotal moment. That book was really transformational for me: looking at the Universe and trying to really understand it but not shying away from the philosophical questions, really hit the niche for me, and I just became fascinated by it all," Bassett remembers.

Up in the sky

His road to artificial intelligence is a cosmic journey of mapping his own academic path.

He completed his undergraduate degree in applied mathematics, physics and mathematics, and honours and master's degrees in applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town, where he is still today, a Full Professor in mathematics and applied mathematics, spending half his time there and half at Wits.

He then did his PhD in astrophysics at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy, followed by postdoctoral studies at Oxford University in the UK. He worked for several years in the UK and Japan before returning to South Africa in the early 2000s to work on the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) and at UCT as a data scientist.

"It was an exciting time in South Africa as astronomy was really taking shape, and for the first time, the country had a new telescope that was world-class. Jump forward to 2017, I joined the new Square Kilometre Array (SKA), where we started its data science team," he says.

Down on Earth

In 2012, Bassett started noticing the seismic shifts happening in artificial intelligence - which has been existing in the shadows of the tech evolution since the mid-20^th Century - and that its Generative AI application-revolution will become the biggest disruptor of our generation.

"I've been using machine learning, which is a branch of AI, for many years as a cosmologist, but then I realised AI was going to take over everything, and I needed to move my career more into computer science while still having the freedom to work on applications of AI.

"Joining the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics made a lot of sense because Wits has the leading AI research group in the country," he says.

Using AI to find microbes and bugs

Today, Bassett is also the Chair in Science in the new Wits Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery (MIND) Institute, where he works closely with the Faculty of Health Sciences in a cross-faculty collaboration to bring in AI to support innovation in the Faculty's research projects.

One example is a project within the Infectious Diseases and Oncology Research Institute (IDORI) where he works with Professor Robert Breiman to use AI to find microbes that cause cancer.

"Rob had the idea: Africa will struggle to afford expensive gene therapies, like sequencing a tumour and designing a drug targeting that exact tumour. So how do we help Africa? If we could find microbes, or bugs, that cause cancers, we could develop a vaccine against the bug and vaccinate people to protect them against the cancer." It's a great idea and could save millions of lives.

"Now we're building AI that will scan all the 30+ million papers that have been published, looking for clues that might connect cancers with these microbes," Bassett says.

Another project being done together with collaborators in health and medicine at Wits is to test how well an AI can diagnose a patient, by not only using text data in hospitals, but also CT scans, MRIs, chest X-rays, blood results and more. "We can then compare the AI diagnosis with the experts' and evaluate how 'mature' the AI is, and then start thinking about real-world applications. This could be a big support for doctors in an overburdened healthcare system, where it can add safety nets, enable doctors to see more patients, and so on."

"This really excites me. It is wonderful to work on projects that will actually make an impact and difference," he says.

Bassett is also working in a collaboration with the Wits Diagnostic Innovation Hub and clinical partners.

"One of the absolutely terrifying things emerging is antimicrobial resistance. We now have superbugs in hospitals, especially in the public healthcare system, that are antibiotic-resistant. If you get one of these superbugs, the probability of survival is shockingly poor. We do have super antibiotics, but we can't overuse them because otherwise we'll breed resistance as these bugs learn to adapt.

"The balancing act is: when do we use these super antibiotics? To diagnose a superbug, when doctors have a patient with sepsis, they would do a culture to determine if it is a superbug and if it is, they could give it these super antibiotics. The problem is, though, that it takes several days, and by the time the results are back, the patient is dead and can't be given the super antibiotics.

"If we could use AI to identify the bug much quicker, doctors can treat much earlier," he explains.

Balancing act

Whether it's a bug or a coffee mug, a bowl or a lampshade, an algorithm or equation, Bassett shows the equilibrium that is vital in a balanced life: between the personal and professional, between the human, AI and creativity.

"The world is going to change in incredible ways in the next decade. Finding ways to ensure that those changes benefit everyone while we stay authentic and true to ourselves is going to be a challenge for all of us" - Distinguished Professor Bruce Bassett.