Zeblon Zenzele Vilakazi FRS (born 3 April 1969) has been Vice Chancellor of the Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa since 1 January 2021.
He speaks French, German, Russian, Xhosa, Zulu, Siswati (Mother tongue), Sesotho, Afrikaans and English.
[citation needed] Vilakazi was born in Katlehong, Ekurhuleni, as the youngest of a family of eight.
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.