Profesor Alphose Zingoni

earned an MSc (with distinction) and 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. In recognition of his outstanding 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). He received a B1 rating of the National Research Foundation in 2016, and in the same year, was elected a Fellow of the University of Cape Town in recognition of “original distinguished academic work”. In 2019, he won the University of Cape Town Book Award for his book “Shell Structures in Civil and Mechanical Engineering”, published in 2018 by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), London.