Professor Alphose Zingoni
Professor Alphose Zingoni served as Director of the KJB Leadership Programme since its inception in 2014. In 2024, the programme will become known as the KJB Leadership Scholarship and will be administered by Student Financial Aid in the Department of Student Affairs. Professor Zingoni is now an Honorary Director.
Alphose Zingoni is Professor of Structural Engineering and Mechanics in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Cape Town. He earned a PhD from Imperial College London in 1992, and was a recipient of a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 from 1992 to 1994. He held appointment as Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Zimbabwe from 1996 to 1999, before moving to the University of Cape Town in 1999, where he served as Head of the Department of Civil Engineering from 2008 to 2012. His research spans shell structures, vibration analysis, studies of symmetry in structural mechanics, and group-theoretic formulations. He has written numerous scientific papers and four books in these areas, and serves on the editorial boards of several international journals. He is founder, chair and editor of the Structural Engineering, Mechanics and Computation (SEMC) series of international conferences, successfully held in Cape Town every 3 years since 2001, and now regarded as one of the leading events in the field. In recognition of his internationally leading contributions, three learned societies have elected him a Fellow: the South African Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Structural Engineers (London), and the International Association of Bridge and Structural Engineering (Zurich). In 2016, he was elected a Fellow of the University of Cape Town in recognition of “original distinguished academic work”, and in 2023, he was awarded the A1 rating by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa in recognition of being a leading international scholar in his field on the basis of the high quality and impact of his research outputs.