Prior to joining the University of Witwatersrand (Wits) in 2014, Zeblon Zenzele Vilakazi, was appointed Group Executive for Research and Development at the Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa (NECSA) in 2011, while also serving as the director of iThemba LABS – a position he held since January 2007. He also holds an honorary professorship in the Department of Physics at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Prof Vilakazi served as a chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Standing Advisory Committee on Nuclear Applications from 2009 to 2011 and is a member of the Programme Advisory Committee for Nuclear Physics at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia and Council of the Academy of Sciences of South Africa (ASSAf). Prof Vilakazi’s research interests include heavy- ion collisions at ultra-relativistic energies and computational physics. He has more than150 refereed articles in Nuclear and High Energy Physics. His scientific achievements include Group Leader of the UCT team that contributed to the development of the High-level Trigger (HLT) tracker for the ALICE experiment at CERN’s (European Centre for Nuclear Research) Large Hadron Collider.