EIE at Wits
We design the systems that move power and information: the grids that light cities, the networks that carry data, the sensors that read the body, and the algorithms that decide what all of it means. Staff and students here work on optical and laser communications, machine learning, brain–computer interfaces and prosthetics, high-voltage engineering, the physics of lightning, wireless networks, power systems, signal processing and control, electronics, and software engineering. Some of that work is abstract enough to take a decade to reach anybody. Some of it is running on a substation this afternoon.
If you are thinking of studying here, the thing worth knowing early is that we teach electrical engineering broadly before we let you specialise. That is a deliberate choice, argued for by a head of department in the 1950s and defended ever since (you will meet him below). It means your first years are heavy on mathematics, computation, physics and the life sciences, and it means our graduates can move between industries later without having to start again. An engineer who can work across several fields tends to have a longer and more interesting career than one who cannot.
How the School began
Electrical engineering at Wits is very nearly as old as the University itself. Professor Heather held the Chair of Electrotechnics from 1914 and continued in the post after Wits was founded, teaching under Professor Orr, who was responsible for all branches of engineering. In 1926, Professor Oswald Randall was appointed to a Chair of Electrical Engineering in its own right, in the same year that the first engineering building was occupied at the new Milner Park campus. During the 1930s, electrical engineering separated formally from mechanical engineering, and it became possible to graduate with a BSc(Eng) in Electrical Engineering. The timing was fortunate. Government policy was encouraging diversification and local manufacturing, South Africa had abandoned the gold standard, and for the first time an electrical engineer could expect to find work outside the mines.
The School's research tradition begins with lightning, and it has never stopped. A lightning research laboratory was first proposed in 1930. Bernard Price, general manager and chief engineer of the Victoria Falls and Transvaal Power Company, took up the idea, championed it, and contributed personally towards the cost, with the Carnegie Corporation of New York providing the balance. The Bernard Price Institute of Geophysical Research opened at Wits in 1937 to study seismology, lightning, terrestrial magnetism, meteorology and radio communications. Its first director was the physicist Basil Schonland, who held the Carnegie-Price Chair of Geophysics and whose work on lightning made the Institute internationally known. The Institute was formally separate from the Department of Electrical Engineering, but much of what it did was electrical engineering by another name, and it was always intended to serve industry as well as pure science.
The Second World War sharpened a distinction that had been forming for years between so-called Light Current engineering, meaning electronics and communications, and Heavy Current, meaning power. Randall, himself a Heavy Current man, thought the two had grown far enough apart to justify separate departments. His successor disagreed. Professor G. R. Bozzoli, known universally as Boz, had served on Schonland's radar team while still a junior member of staff in Electrical Engineering, and his own research interest was acoustics. Bozzoli held that an electrical engineer should be given a general education rather than an early specialisation, and it is his view, not Randall's, that still shapes the degree you would take here. He did concede that the two fields needed senior staff with different backgrounds, and in 1957 he oversaw the creation of a second chair in Heavy Current, whose first incumbent was Professor William Cormack. Bozzoli remained head of department and kept the original chair, by then named the De Beers Chair of Electrical Engineering after its sponsor.
What followed is a straightforward line of succession. When Bozzoli became Deputy Vice-Chancellor, and later Vice-Chancellor, Cormack succeeded him as head of department. Professor Hu Hanrahan took the Chair of Electronics, as Light Current had become known, and later the Chair of Communications Engineering, with Professor Mike Rodd taking over Electronics. Professor Jan Reynders succeeded Cormack in the Heavy Current chair and served for a period as head of department, as did Rodd and Hanrahan. Further chairs were created, including Control Engineering. Professor Charles Landy became head of department and was succeeded on his retirement by Professor Ian Jandrell, whose research in high voltage and lightning carried Schonland's tradition into a fourth generation and who now serves as a Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University. Professor Estelle Trengove, herself a graduate of the School, became its first female Head of School in 2017 and led it for seven years, through a period of curriculum renewal and the disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic. Professor Cuthbert Nyamupangedengu has headed the School since 2024. Restructuring turned the Department of Electrical Engineering into the School of Electrical and Information Engineering, a change of name that reflected how much of electrical engineering had become information engineering. Students may now choose a final-year concentration and graduate with an Information Engineering endorsement.
What our graduates built
The School's graduates have a habit of producing results that other people go on to build on, which is a rarer thing than a distinguished career.
Louis Jacobson, who graduated in 1932, founded Alpha Harris, later absorbed into the First Electric Company of South Africa, and designed and manufactured heavy electrical machinery at a time when almost none of it was made locally. He went on to found F.W.J. Electrical Industries with Carl Fuchs and did early work on earth-leakage protection for the mines, which is to say that he spent his career making a dangerous industry less lethal. Trevor Wadley, whose first degree was from Howard College and whose Wits DSc came in 1959 for a thesis on heterodyne techniques in specialised radio instrumentation, invented the Wadley loop, which appeared in serious radio receivers for the next thirty years, and the Tellurometer, the first successful instrument for measuring distance by microwave. Jules Fejer, a Wits MSc graduate, published the first accurate estimate of how long Sputnik would stay in orbit, and then wrote the theory of incoherent backscatter that underpins ionospheric radar to this day. Tingye Li graduated in 1953, spent forty-one years at Bell Laboratories, and in 1961 published with A. G. Fox the analysis of resonant modes in a laser cavity on which every laser designed since has depended. He then led the wavelength-division multiplexing work that made long-haul optical communication affordable. If you have used the internet today, you have used Li's work twice.
A second group made their careers at universities abroad. David Mayne graduated here with a BSc and an MSc and lectured in the School in the 1950s before leaving for Imperial College, where he became one of the founders of modern control theory and a principal architect of model predictive control, the method now used to run industrial plants worldwide. David Jacobson, Louis Jacobson's son, graduated in 1963, completed his doctorate under Mayne, and invented differential dynamic programming, whose descendants are standard equipment in robotics and reinforcement learning; his later work on risk-sensitive control was taken up by two economists who went on to win a Nobel Prize. Berthold Horn graduated in 1965 and helped create the field of machine vision at MIT. David Forsyth graduated in 1984, stayed on for a master's in 1986, and went on to hold a chair at Illinois and to co-write the standard textbook on computer vision, an interest that began with his final-year Wits project analysing particle sizes in photographs for the gold mines. Igor Aleksander held the Gabor Chair at Imperial and co-created WISARD, an early neural pattern-recognition machine. Reuven Kitai spent his career at McMaster in measurement and instrumentation and led the IEEE society in that field. Mickey Milner became Professor Emeritus at Toronto and a pioneer of rehabilitation engineering. David Limebeer headed Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial, is an Emeritus Professor at Oxford, and holds an appointment in this School today. Nigel Middleton graduated with distinction in 1976, earned a doctorate here, and rose to senior executive office at the Colorado School of Mines.
What our graduates are building now
The pattern has not changed, only the subject matter.
Start with Peter Harrod. He graduated cum laude in 1976, went on to a doctorate at UMIST, designed chips at GEC and then at Motorola in Austin, and in 1988 joined a small computer company in Cambridge called Acorn. Two years later he was one of the team of twelve who left it to found Arm. Arm's processors now sit in more than nine out of every ten smartphones on Earth, and its licensees have shipped more than three hundred billion chips. Harrod is still there, thirty-six years on, working on functional safety for the real-time processors that go into cars. Somewhere in your pocket is a piece of silicon that a Wits electrical engineering graduate helped make possible.
Two other graduates of this School independently built two of the most successful early-stage investment firms in the world. Robin Klein read electrical engineering here in the 1960s and stayed for a master's, conducted the first documented e-commerce transaction in Britain in 1995, and co-founded LocalGlobe in London. David Frankel graduated in 1992, founded Internet Solutions and grew it into the largest internet service provider in Africa, then co-founded Founder Collective in Boston. All three of Roy Lurie's degrees are from this School. He founded Opti-Num Solutions in 1992 while still finishing his doctorate, and is now Vice President of Engineering for MATLAB at MathWorks, which means that the software sitting on the laptop of almost every engineering student on Earth is engineered under a Wits electrical engineering graduate. Opti-Num itself is today led by Grant Grobbelaar, who holds three degrees from this School and taught signals and systems, control and modelling in these lecture theatres before leaving to run the company. Ryan Canin graduated in 2013, founded DocFox with two fellow Witsies, and sold it to nCino in 2024. Barry Dwolatzky, who graduated in 1975 and completed a PhD here in 1979, founded the Joburg Centre for Software Engineering and the Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct in Braamfontein, and spent the last part of his life building an industry in Johannesburg.
Our graduates also run large companies and large parts of them. Alan Dickson holds three Wits degrees, led Reunert for twelve years and now leads AECI. Robert Fleming holds a BSc and a doctorate from this School and is President of Northrop Grumman's Space Systems sector. Manny Pohl graduated in 1975, built an investment business in Australia, and gives a fixed share of its profits away each year through his foundation. Entelect, one of the largest software engineering firms in the country, with roughly two thousand people across seven countries, began in 2001 in a corner of this School when Charles Pritchard, a senior lecturer here with a doctorate in electrical engineering, started a company on the side. He later hired a recent graduate of this School named Shashi Hansjee, who has run it since 2014.
The newest work is the reason to pay attention. Shakir Mohamed graduated in 2005 and is a Research Director at Google DeepMind and a co-founder of the Deep Learning Indaba, which has done more than any other single effort to build a machine-learning community across this continent. Vukosi Marivate is a BSc and MSc graduate of this School, holds a chair in data science at Pretoria, co-founded both Masakhane and Lelapa AI, and was awarded the Order of Mapungubwe in 2026 for his work on African-language technology. Pelonomi Moiloa read biomedical and electrical engineering here because she was interested in artificial limbs, and now leads Lelapa AI, which has built some of the first small language models designed for African languages rather than adapted to them. Whether a machine can understand isiZulu as well as it understands English is a question that matters enormously here, and is best answered here. Our graduates are answering it.
What you can study here
We offer the four-year professional BSc(Eng) in Electrical Engineering, with the option of an Information Engineering endorsement in the final year, alongside three-year Bachelor of Engineering Science degrees introduced at the turn of the millennium to sit beside the professional programmes. Professor David Rubin, a specialist medical practitioner with a biomedical engineering qualification, developed the BEngSci in Biomedical Engineering, which took its first students in 2003 and is designed to lead onwards into Electrical Engineering or Medicine. In 2012, we launched a BEngSci specialising in Game Design with the Wits Digital Arts department. Its graduates turn out to be sought after well beyond games, because an expert programmer with an eye for how something should look and feel is useful in almost any modern software environment.
Postgraduate study runs from honours through to doctoral research across every area named at the top of this page. Our students publish, patent, and rather often leave to start companies.
A hundred years, and the next one
The Chair of Electrical Engineering at Wits was established in 1926. In the century since, this School has taught the people who worked out how light travels down a fibre, how a plant controls itself, how a machine sees, and how a language with no digital corpus can be given one. It has also taught several thousand engineers who will not appear on a page like this one, who kept the lights on and the networks running, and without whom none of the rest would have mattered.
We like hearing from our graduates, wherever in the world you ended up. If you studied here, tell us what you have been doing.