| Zeblon Zenzele Vilakazi | |||
| Title1: | Vice-Chancellor and Principal of University of the Witwatersrand | ||
| 1Blankname1: | Chancellor | ||
| 1Namedata1: | Judy Dlamini | ||
| Predecessor1: | Adam Habib | ||
| Successor1: | incumbent | ||
| Term Start1: | 1 January 2021 | ||
| Term End1: | present | ||
| Birth Date: | 3 April 1969 | ||
| Birth Place: | Katlehong, Ekurhuleni, Gauteng, South Africa | ||
| Profession: | Physicist University administrator | ||
| Alma Mater: | European Centre for Nuclear Research (PhD) | ||
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Zeblon Zenzele Vilakazi (born 3 April 1969) has been Vice Chancellor of the Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa since 1 January 2021.[1] Professor Vilakazi is a nuclear physicist.[2] [3] Prior to his promotion, he was Vice-Principal and Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Postgraduate Studies. He speaks French, German, Russian, Xhosa, Zulu, Siswati (Mother tongue), Sesotho, Afrikaans and English.
Vilakazi was born in Katlehong, Ekurhuleni, as the youngest of a family of eight.[4] His mother was a housewife, and his father ran a small shop in the community.[5] He was one of the first students from Africa to conduct PhD research at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. This was followed by a National Research Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at CERN.
After conducting his doctoral research at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, he returned to South Africa and became a lecturer at the University of Cape Town, where he was instrumental in establishing South Africa’s first experimental high-energy physics research group focusing on the development of the High-level Trigger for the CERN-ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. He joined the University of the Witwatersrand in January 2014 as the Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research and Postgraduate Affairs and was promoted to the position of Vice-Principal in April 2020. He is a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in May 2022.[6] [7]