Caption: Sir Adrian Smith, President of the Royal Society (left) inducts Professor Zeblon Vilakazi as a Fellow of the Royal Society. Photo Supplied.
Wits Vice-Chancellor and Principal, Professor Zeblon Vilakazi, has been inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society, one of the world’s most prestigious scientific academies.
The London-based Royal Society is a self-governing fellowship made up of the most eminent scientists, engineers and technologists from the United Kingdom and Commonwealth. Fellows and foreign members are elected for life through a peer review process on the basis of excellence in science.
There are about 1 700 fellows and foreign members, including about 85 Nobel laureates. Each year, up to 52 fellows and up to 10 foreign members are elected from a group of around 800 candidates, who are proposed by the existing fellowship.
“I am honoured to be welcomed as a Fellow of the Royal Society,” said Vilakazi.
Professor Zeblon Zenzele Vilakazi joins the ranks of Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Dorothy Hodgkin, Phillip Tobias, Nobel Prize winner Aaron Klug and Stephen Hawking, among others.
Vilakazi is a nuclear physicist and has served as the Vice-Chancellor and Principal of Wits University since January 2021. Prior to his appointment, he served as the Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Postgraduate Studies, during which time Wits’ research outputs doubled.
“This is not just an honour for me, but also for Wits University, South Africa, and all those who supported me. South Africa is home to a host of incredibly talented scientists, who punch above their weight in the global knowledge arena.
“Whilst this Fellowship acknowledges some of my achievements, more importantly it recognises the high calibre of science and scientists based in Africa,” he said.
President of the Royal Society, the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence in the world, Sir Adrian Smith, said it was an honour to welcome so many outstanding researchers from around the world into the fellowship of the Royal Society.
“Through their careers so far, these researchers have helped further our understanding of human disease, biodiversity loss and the origins of the universe. I am also pleased to see so many new fellows working in areas likely to have a transformative impact on our society over this century, from new materials and energy technologies to synthetic biology and artificial intelligence. I look forward to seeing what great things they will achieve in the years ahead,” Smith said.
A Wits alumnus, Vilakazi obtained his PhD in 1998 in nuclear physics under the supervision of the late Professor J Sellschop. He was then awarded a prestigious National Research Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. He returned to South Africa and joined the University of Cape Town in 1999, 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.
Vilakazi was appointed as the Director of iThemba Labs in 2007 and then simultaneously as the group executive for research and development at the Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa in 2011, before joining Wits in 2014.
Professor Vilakazi served as a visiting scientist at the Atomic Energy Commission and Alternative Energy in Saclay, France, as the 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 currently a member of the Programme Advisory Committee for Nuclear Physics at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. He is also a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa.
In 2010, he was nominated by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader. He has an extensive list of refereed articles in Nuclear and High Energy Physics and is a regular invitee for talks and presentations at conferences and seminars.
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