Zabulon Vilakazi is Director of iThemba LABS, the largest nuclear accelerator complex in Africa and possible the Southern Hemisphere. Prior, he served more than two years as Group Executive for Research and Development at the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation. His research interests include heavy ion collisions at high energies and computational physics. Vilakazi obtained his PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand and was a National Research Foundation (NRF) post-doctoral Associate at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN). He then took up an academic position at the University of Cape Town where he was involved in a large scientific project conducted at the ALICE experiment of CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Vilakazi holds the title of Honorary Professor of Physics at the University of Cape Town. He currently serves as a Member of the Program Advisory Committee of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia. From 2009 to 2011, he served as Chairman of the IAEA Standing Advisory Committee on Nuclear Applications.