Prof Connell is Professor of Physics within the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment at the University of Johannesburg. He has research interests in Particle, Nuclear, Quantum and Applied Physics, Nuclear Energy, Materials Science, High Performance Computing and Innovation. He is a past president of the South African Institute of Physics. He is the founding member of the SA participation in High Energy Physics at ATLAS at CERN. He has published over 170 papers in International Journals and is also an ATLAS author. He has a Scopus H-index of 78 with over 27,000 citations. He is interested in technology and innovation for competitive industry (particularly in peaceful applications of nuclear technology) and has a project on the intelligent sensor-based sorting of diamond in kimberlite. He supports Nuclear Energy, both large scale generation and also Small Modular Reactors. He has worked on Open Source Monte Carlo Nuclear Engineering code development and also on Fibre Optic based on-line, in-core, real-time 4IR sensing for reactors. He also works on the implementation of the roadmap towards the African Light Source (chair: Exec). He is also on the steering committee developing the community driven African Strategy for Physics