Fulufhelo Vincent Nelwamondo is an electrical engineer by training, and holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand, in South Africa. He is the youngest recipient of the Harvard-South Africa Fellowship Programme amongst other honours. His research and practical experience has covered a wide spectrum of areas, including software engineering and computational intelligence. His interests include biometrics-based systems, data mining and machine learning tools.
Early life and career
Nelwamondo was born in 1982 in Lukau village, within the greater Lwamondo Village in Venda, Limpopo province, South Africa. He attended Belemu Primary School and he matriculated at Mbilwi Secondary School. He was awarded a bursary by Eskom to study Electrical engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He completed his BEng in 2005, was accredited by the Engineering Council South Africa in 2006 and obtained his PhD in 2008 under supervision of Tshilidzi Marwala. Nelwamondo joined the Modelling and Digital Science unit of the CSIR in 2008. He became acting director of MDS on 2014 and Executive Director of MDS in 2016. Prior to 2008 he had been a principal researcher and a competence area manager for Information Security. He was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University for 2008-2009 as part of the Harvard Centre for African Studies' South African Fellowship programme. This award in 2008 made him the youngest recipient of the Harvard-South Africa Fellowship Programme. In November 2011 he was listed as a Senior Member of the IEEE. He is a visiting professor at the University of Johannesburg and was listed as a Promising Young Researcher in UJ's list of NRF rated researchers. He is a founding board member of the South African Young Academy of Science. In 2011, a South African breakfast cereal manufacturer, Pioneer Foods, conducted an interview with Nelwamondo as part of a series of advertisements celebrating South African achievers and the breakfast cereal ProNutro.
Awards
In addition to a number of CSIR awards, Newlamondo has been awarded the following, inter alia:
In 2016 the Operations Research Society of South Africa awarded Nelwamondo a Category III Recognition Award, granted to a non-member of the ORSSA for outstanding contributions over a long period of time.
Nelwamondo was an editor and a reviewer for a number of international journals and in programme committees of several international conferences. He has published over 100 research papers in peer-reviewed journals, conferences and book chapters. Some of the conference in which he has participated include:
