Zeblon Zenzele Vilakazi is the Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Witwatersrand. He was instrumental in establishing South Africa's first experimental high-energy physics research group at CERN, working on the Large hadron Collider. Vilakazi has fostered international collaborative research, as director of iThemba LABS (the largest cyclotron facility in the southern hemisphere) where he initiated a flagship rare - isotope beam (RIB) project. In 2019 he played a key role in securing a place for African academic partners in the development of practical applications through access to the IBM Quantum computing network. In May 2022, Prof. Zeblon Vilakazi was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society (UK).