Professor Tshilidzi Marwala is a Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment at the University of Johannesburg.

He was a full Professor of Electrical Engineering, the Carl and Emily Fuchs Chair of Systems and Control Engineering as well as the South Africa Chair of Systems Engineering all at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Before this, he was an executive assistant to the technical director at the South African Breweries.


He holds a BSc in Mechanical Engineering (magna cum laude) from Case Western Reserve University, a Master of Mechanical Engineering from University of Pretoria, PhD in Engineering from University of Cambridge and was a post-doctoral associate at Imperial College. His research interests include applications of computational intelligence to engineering, computer science, finance and medicine.

He has extensive track record in human capacity development having supervised 39 Masters and 10 PhD graduates to completion. Some of these students have proceeded with their doctoral and post-doctoral studies at leading universities such as Harvard, Rutgers, Purdue, Oxford, Cambridge, British Columbia and Concordia.

He has published six books (4 published by Springer-Verlag, London), over 200 papers in journals, proceedings and book chapters and holds three international patents. He is an associate editor of the International Journal of Systems Science (Taylor and Francis Publishers) and was an associate editor of the South African Journal of Science. Marwala is a registered professional engineer in South Africa, a Fellow of The Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, Academy of Science of South Africa, South African Academy of Engineering and a distinguished member of the Association for Computing Machinery.

He has received more than 40 awards including the Order of Mapungubwe from the South African Government and the President’s Award from the National Research Foundation.