Rate My Professor Zeblon Vilakazi

Professor Zeblon Zenzele Vilakazi serves as Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of the Witwatersrand, a position he has held since January 2021, with reappointment for a second term commencing in 2026. He previously joined the university in 2014 as Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research and Postgraduate Affairs and was promoted to Vice-Principal in 2020. A nuclear physicist, Professor Vilakazi obtained his PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1998 under the supervision of the late Professor J Sellschop. He completed postdoctoral research at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva following a National Research Foundation fellowship. He holds an MSc from the University of the Witwatersrand and a BSc from the University of Manchester.

Prior to his roles at Wits, Professor Vilakazi served as Director of iThemba LABS from 2007 and as Group Executive for Research and Development at the Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa (NECSA) from 2011. He established South Africa’s first experimental high-energy physics research group at the University of Cape Town, where he holds an honorary professorship in the Department of Physics, with a focus on the High-level Trigger for the CERN-ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. His leadership includes serving as chairperson of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Standing Advisory Committee on Nuclear Applications from 2009 to 2011 and as a member of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics Working Group for Nuclear Physics. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (elected 2022), a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences, and a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa. In 2010, he was nominated as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Professor Vilakazi has authored an extensive list of refereed articles in nuclear and high-energy physics and is a frequent invited speaker at international conferences.