Prof Tshilidzi Marwala, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research and Internationalisation at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), is one of six distinguished alumni honoured by the Alumni Association of Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland, Ohio (USA).
Prof Marwala is the recipient of CWRU’s Professional Achievement Award. This award recognises outstanding alumni of CWRU who have achieved exceptional accomplishment in their career and brought distinction to themselves and the university through their work and leadership in their professional community.
He shared the stage with Fred Gray, JD (LAW ’54, HON ’92) and Morton Mandel (HON ’07, CWR ’13), who were honoured with the Distinguished Alumni Award; Donald Foster (ADL ’50) with Newton D. Baker received the Distinguished Service Award; Nancy Fink (WRC ’73) with the Daniel T. Clancy Alumni Service Award; and Aleksandra V. Rachitskaya (MED ’08) with the Young Alumni Award. The awards were recently bestowed at the Homecoming Luncheon at Tinkham Veale University Center’s Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Grand Ballroom.
Prior to his appointment as the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research and Internationalisation, Prof Marwala (CWR ’95) held the position of Executive Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment at UJ.
He also served as a full Professor of Electrical Engineering, the Carl and Emily Fuchs Chair of Systems and Control Engineering as well as the South Africa Research Chair Initiative (SARChI) of Systems Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand. Prior to this, he was an executive assistant to the technical director at the South African Breweries.
He has served as the Chair of the Local Loop Unbundling Committee that was tasked by the Department of Communications with the responsibility to unbundle Telkom’s local loop; as a Chairman of the Pikitup Board; on the Board of Directors of the State Information Technology Agency (SITA); EOH Pty Ltd; Denel Soc Ltd; City Power Johannesburg Soc Ltd; as a Deputy Chairman of the Limpopo Business Support Agency; as a member of the National Advisory Council on Innovation; and as a member of Statistics South Africa Council. He is a member of the ICT Advisory Council of the South African government and he is a Chairman of the ICT Infrastructure of the Department of Communications.
Prof Marwala holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering (magna cum laude) from CWRU (USA), a Master’s of Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pretoria, a PhD in Engineering from Cambridge University, was a post-doctoral research associate at the Imperial College (London) and completed a Program for Leadership Development at Harvard Business School.
He is a registered professional engineer, a Fellow of TWAS, The Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, the Academy of Science of South Africa, The African Academy of Sciences, CSIR and the South African Academy of Engineering. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering) and a distinguished member of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery).
Prof Marwala has been published in The Economist, New Scientist and Time magazines.
