Anton Albert van Niekerk (born 4 December 1953) is a South African bioethicist and academic based at Stellenbosch University. Biography Van Niekerk was born in Brits, in what was then known as Transvaal, South Africa. After matriculating in 1971 from the Paul Roos Gymnasium School in Stellenbosch, he obtained a BA degree (1974), BA Honours in philosophy (1976), MA in philosophy (1980), BTh (1978) and a licentiate in theology (1979), all cum laude, from Stellenbosch University. He obtained his DPhil in 1983. The title of his MA thesis was The Limits of Critical Reason: a Critical Inquiry of the Rationality Model of Critical Rationalism. His doctoral dissertation was entitled Analogy and Theology: A Critical-Philosophical Investigation of Analogy Theories about the Meaning of Theological Language. Both were supervised by Prof Hennie Rossouw. Van Niekerk was awarded the Chancellor's Medal for the best final year student from Stellenbosch University in 1980 for his MA. In 1980, he was appointed as lecturer in philosophy at the Stellenbosch University. He was promoted to senior lecturer in 1985 and awarded a professorship in 1989. He created the Centre for Applied Ethics, and the Unit for Bioethics within this centre, at the same university and has been director of both since their inception in 1990. He was chair of the Department of Philosophy at Stellenbosch University from 1990 to 2001 and again from 2006 to 2013. In 2014, he was appointed as one of a select group of distinguished professors at Stellenbosch University. In total, he has written 18 books, 140 journal articles and book chapters and approximately 180 popular articles. He has supervised 26 completed doctoral dissertations and 77 master's theses. Work His research fields include bioethics, philosophy of religion and philosophy of the social sciences (with an emphasis upon hermeneutic approaches). Van Niekerk is one of the pioneers of the establishment of bioethics as an academic discipline in South Africa. In 1996, he was largely responsible for the introduction of the MPhil degree in applied ethics at Stellenbosch University, a program which was the first and still is the best known of its kind in South Africa. As a young lecturer, he was at the forefront of political and intellectual debate and a vehement critic of the apartheid regime in South Africa. In 2011, he was assaulted in his office at the university by a member of a reactionary right wing movement as a