Thompson Chengeta is a European Council Research Fellow on Drone Violence and Artificial Intelligence Ethics at the University of Southampton (UK), where he leads research on autonomous weapon systems. He serves as a legal expert member of the International Panel on the Regulation of Autonomous Weapons  – an independent and interdisciplinary panel of international experts working in the framework of the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. Chengeta also serves as an international law expert for the International Committee for Robots Arms Control and provides legal expertise to the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and a number of African States on disarmament issues.

Chengeta is an Associate Researcher at the South African Research Chair in International Law (SARCIL), University of Johannesburg, where he is also a founding editor of SARCIL Blog on international law. He is a non-resident fellow at the Institute of International and Comparative Law in Africa, University of Pretoria and also teaches in the LLM/MPhil (Human Rights & Democratisation in Africa) presented by the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria. He is an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at Midlands State University where he teaches in the LLM Constitutional and Human Rights Law Program. In 2018, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford.

Chengeta studied law at Harvard Law School (LLM), University of Pretoria (LLD & LLM) and Midlands State University (LLB).