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TSHILIDZI MARWALA, the author of Heal our World, Leading in the 21st Century and Leadership Lessons from Books I Have Read is the Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Johannesburg. From 1 March 2023, he will be the Rector of the United Nations University based in Tokyo, Japan. He was previously Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Johannesburg and Full Professor at the Carl & Emily Fuchs Chair of Systems and Control Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Tshilidzi holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering (magna cum laude) from Case Western Reserve University, a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Cambridge and a Post-Doc at Imperial College (London). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), the African Academy of Sciences (AAS) and the South African Academy of Engineering (SAAE). He is a distinguished member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). His research interests are multidisciplinary and include the theory and application of artificial intelligence to engineering, computer science, finance, social science and medicine.

He has supervised 37 doctoral students. He has also published 23 books on artificial intelligence (one translated into Chinese) and over 300 papers in journals, proceedings, book chapters and magazines. He holds five international patents. 

Tshilidzi was an associate editor of the International Journal of Systems Science (Taylor & Francis Publishers). He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, University of California at Berkeley, Wolfson College of the University of Cambridge, Nanjing Tech University and Silesian University of Technology in Poland. His opinions have appeared in New Scientist, The Economist, Time Magazine, publications of the Royal Society, the Cambridge Union and the Oxford Union, as well as on BBC and CNN.