Ahmed Bawa

Ahmed Bawa, a theoretical physicist, leads Universities South Africa. Until 30 April 2016 he was Vice-Chancellor and Principal of Durban University of Technology and before that spent several years as a faculty member of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Hunter College and a member of the doctoral faculty at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He served as the Program Officer for Higher Education in Africa with the Ford Foundation and during this time led and coordinated the Foundation’s African Higher Education Initiative. Ahmed Bawa holds a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the University of Durham in the UK. He served on a number of policy development teams in the post-1994 period in the areas of Science and Technology and Higher Education. He is Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa as well as the Academy of Science of South Africa of which he was one of the inaugural vice-presidents and is a current Council member. He also served as Chair of the Board of the Foundation for Research Development, and was Vice-Chair of the board of the Atomic Energy Corporation.