UJ Council names new vice-chancellor and principal

From L-R: Prof Ihron Rensburg, Vice-Chancellor and Principal; Chairperson of the University’s Council, Prof Roy Marcus; and Prof Tshilidzi Marwala, Vice-Chancellor Designate.

Prof Marwala, who is currently the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research and Internationalisation at UJ, will succeed Professor Ihron Rensburg on 1 January 2018.

Announcing the decision following the University’s Council meeting on Thursday, 22 June 2017, the Chairperson of the University’s Council, Professor Roy Marcus, said the appointment of Prof Marwala will further advance the strategic goal of the University to become Africa’s epicentre of critical intellectual enquiry.

“Since its establishment in 2005, and under the bold and visionary leadership of Prof Ihron Rensburg, the University has had a remarkable journey that has seen it become the national standard bearer for transformation, equity, access, and Pan African and global excellence. As a result, the University has become a leading African university with global stature that is now ranked 7th amongst Africa’s universities, and ranked within the top 2.3% of universities in the world as published in the QS World University Rankings for 2017/2018," said Prof Marcus.

"I am confident that Prof Marwala will further advance UJ’s vision of excellence in teaching, research and innovation, internationalisation, public scholarship and community engagement. Prof Marwala’s excellent academic pedigree and extensive national and international experiences will be vital to deepening and widening on our strategic goal of Pan African and global excellence and stature."

Biography

Prof Marwala has a distinguished tenure at UJ as the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research and Internationalisation since 2013, and was previously UJ’s Executive Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment. Prof Marwala has received in excess of 45 honours and awards, including the Order of Mapungubwe and was the first African engineer to be awarded the National Research Foundation’s President’s award.

Notable other honours and awards include being the Carl and Emily Fuchs Chair of Systems and Control Engineering as well as the SARChI Chair of Systems Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand. Prof Marwala academic qualifications include a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering (magna cum laude) from Case Western Reserve University (USA), a Master of Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pretoria and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Engineering from Cambridge University. He completed a post-doctoral research associateship at the Imperial College (London) and a programme for Leadership Development at Harvard Business School.

Prof Marwala is a registered professional engineer, a fellow of TWAS (The World Academy of Sciences), the Academy of Science of South Africa, the African Academy of Sciences, the South African Academy of Engineering, a senior member of the IEEE (the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and a distinguished member of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery).

Prof Marwala’s research interests are multi-disciplinary and include the theory and application of computational intelligence to engineering, computer science, finance, social science and medicine. As a B-rated researcher, he has published nine books, over 300 papers in journals, proceedings, book chapters and magazines and holds three international patents. He is an associate editor of the International Journal of Systems Science (Taylor and Francis Publishers) and has been a reviewer for more than 40 ISI journals. His global network is wide and includes being a visiting scholar at Harvard University, at the University of California at Berkeley, at the Wolfson College of University of Cambridge and at Nanjing Tech University. Prof Marwala is also a member of the programming council of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Silesian University of Technology (Poland).