Donald P. Eckman Award

Hana El-Samad is a faculty member in the department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco and the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3), where she holds the Grace Boyer Junior Endowed Chair in Biophysics and is a 2010 Packard Fellow. Dr. El-Samad joined UCSF after obtaining a doctorate degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, preceded by a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from the Iowa State University. Dr. El-Samad's research group emphasizes the role of control theory and dynamical systems in the study of biological networks. Her research interests include the investigation of stress responses and biological stochastic phenomena, in addition to the establishment of computational and technological infrastructures that allow for their quantitative probing in single cells.

Domitilla Del Vecchio received the Ph.D. degree in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, and the Laurea in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rome at Tor Vergata in 2005 and 1999, respectively. From January 2006 to May 2010, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and in the Center for Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor in June 2010.

Domitilla Del Vecchio is a recipient of the NSF Career Award (2007), the Crosby Award, University of Michigan (2007), the American Control Conference Best Student Paper Award (2004), and the Bank of Italy Fellowship (2000). Domitilla Del Vecchio has served on the Program Committee of the American Control Conference and of the Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control Conference. Her research interests are in the control of hybrid dynamical systems with imperfect information and in the analysis and design of bio-molecular feedback systems.

Paulo Tabuada was born in Lisbon, Portugal, one year after the Carnation Revolution. He received his "Licenciatura" degree in Aerospace Engineering from Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon, Portugal in 1998 and his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2002 from the Institute for Systems and Robotics, a private research institute associated with Instituto Superior Tecnico. Between January 2002 and July 2003 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. After spending 3 years at the University of Notre Dame, as an Assistant Professor, he joined the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he directs the Cyber-Physical Systems Laboratory.

Paulo Tabuada was the recipient of the Francisco de Holanda prize in 1998 for the best research project with an artistic or aesthetic component. He was a finalist for the Best Student Paper Award at the 2001 American Control Conference and at the 2001 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, as a student, and at the 2008 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, as an advisor. He was the recipient of a NSF CAREER award in 2005 and of the 2009 Donald P. Eckman award from the American Automatic Control Council. He is an IEEE Senior Member, co-edited the volume Networked Embedded Sensing and Control published by Springer, co-chaired the International Conference Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control 2009 (HSCC'09), and serves as an associate editor for the IEEE Embedded Systems Letters. His latest book, on verification and control of hybrid systems, will be published by Springer during the summer of 2009.

His research interests include modeling, analysis, and control of real-time, embedded, networked, and distributed systems; geometric control theory, and mathematical systems theory.

Asu Ozdaglar received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, in 1996, and the S.M. and the Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, in 1998 and 2003, respectively. Since 2003, she has been a member of the faculty of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she is currently the Class of 1943 Career Development Associate Professor. She is also a member of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Operations Research Center (ORC) at MIT.

Her research interests include optimization theory (with emphasis on nonlinear programming, convex analysis and nonconvex optimization), game theory, network economics, distributed optimization methods, and network optimization and control. She is the co-author (with Dimitri P. Bertsekas and Angelia Nedic) of the book entitled “Convex Analysis and Optimization” (Athena Scientific, 2003). She is the recipient of a Microsoft fellowship, the MIT Graduate Student Council Teaching award, and the NSF Career award.

Daniel Liberzon was born in the former Soviet Union on April 22, 1973. He was a student in the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University from 1989 to 1993 and received the Ph.D. degree in mathematics from Brandeis University in 1998 (under the supervision of Prof. Roger W. Brockett of Harvard University).

Following a postdoctoral position in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Yale University from 1998 to 2000, he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, where he is now an associate professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and a research associate professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory. Dr. Liberzon's research interests linear control theory, analysis and synthesis of switched systems, control with limited information, and uncertain and stochastic systems. He is the author of the book Switching in Systems and Control (Birkhauser, 2003) and the author or coauthor of over thirty journal articles on the above topics. Dr. Liberzon served as an Associate Editor on the IEEE Control Systems Society Conference Editorial Board in 1999-2000, and currently serves on the editorial board of the journal Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems. He received the IFAC Young Author Prize and the NSF CAREER Award, both in 2002, and was elected a senior member of IEEE in 2004. He received the Donald P. Eckman Award from the American Automatic Control Council in 2007, and the Xerox Award for Faculty Research from the UIUC College of Engineering also in 2007.

Murat Arcak was born in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1973. He received the B.S. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Bogazici University, Istanbul, in 1996, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1997 and 2000, under the direction of Petar Kokotovic. After a brief postdoctoral stint at Santa Barbara, in 2001 he joined the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, as an assistant professor of Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering. He has also held short-term visiting appointments at theUniversity of Melbourne, Australia, and at Ecole des Mines de Paris, France.

Dr. Arcak?s research is in nonlinear control theory and its applications, with particular interest in robust and observer-based feedback designs, and in analysis and design of largescale networks. In these areas he has published over eighty journal and conference papers, and organized several technical workshops. He is a member of SIAM, a senior member of IEEE, as well as an associate editor for Automatica and for the Conference Editorial Board of IEEE Control Systems Society. He received anNSF CAREER Award in 2003.

Pablo A. Parrilo received an Electronics Engineering undergraduatedegree from the University of Buenos Aires, and a Ph.D. in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology in 1995 and 2000, respectively. He has held short-term visiting appointments at the University of California at Santa Barbara (Physics), Lund Institute of Technology (Automatic Control), and UC Berkeley (Mathematics). From October 2001 through September 2004, he was Assistant Professor of Analysis and Control Systems at the Automatic Control Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich). He is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is affiliated with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Operations Research Center (ORC).

Prof. Parrilo was a finalist for the Tucker Prize of the Mathematical Programming Society for theyears 2000-2003. His research interests include optimization methods for engineering applications,control and identification of uncertain complex systems, robustness analysis and synthesis, and thedevelopment and application of computational tools based on convex optimization and algorithmicalgebra to practically relevant problems in engineering, economics, and physics.

Panagiotis D. Christofides was born in Athens, Greece, in 1970. He received the Diploma in Chemical Engineering degree in 1992, from the University of Patras, Greece, the M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics in 1995 and 1996, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering in 1996, all from the University of Minnesota. Since July 1996 he has been with the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is currently Associate Professor. His theoretical researchinterests include nonlinear control, singular perturbations, and analysis and control of distributed parameter systems, multiscale systems and hybrid systems, with applications to advanced materials processing, particulate processes, biological systems and fluid flows. His research work has resulted in a large number of articles in leading scientific journals and conferences and two books entitled Nonlinear and Robust Control of PDE Systems: Methods and Applications to Transport-Reaction Processes (Birkhäuser, 2001) and Model-Based Control of Particulate Processes (Kluwer Academic, 2002).

Professor Christofides has been a member of the Control Systems Society Conference Editorial Board and is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, the 2004 Program Coordinator of the Applied Mathematics and Numerical Analysis Area of AIChE and the Program Vice-Chair for Invited Sessions for the 2004 American Control Conference. Professor Christofides has received the Teaching Award from the AIChE Student Chapter of UCLA in 1997, a Research Initiation Award from the Petroleum Research Fund in 1998, a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation in 1998, the Ted Peterson Student Paper Award from the Computing and Systems Technology Division of AIChE in 1999 and a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research in 2001. He has also received twice the O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award in 2000 (with Antonios Armaou) and 2004 (with D. Ni, Y. Lou, L. Sha, S. Lao and J. P. Chang), and the Donald P. Eckman Award in 2004, all from the American Automatic Control Council.

Claire Tomlin received the Ph. D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1998. Since September 1998 she has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in Electrical Engineering. She is a graduate fellow in the Division of Applied Sciences at Harvard University in 1994, and she has been a visiting researcher at NASA Ames Research Center during 1994-1998, at Honeywell Technology Center in 1997, and at the University of British Columbia in 1994.

Claire Tomlin is a recipient of the AIAA Outstanding Teacher Award, Stanford (2001), NSF Career Award, Stanford (1999), Terman Fellowship, Stanford (1998), the Bernard Friedman Memorial Prize in Applied Mathematics, Berkeley (1998), and the Zonta Amelia Earhart Award for Aeronautics Research (1996-98). She was an invited participant in the National Academy of Engineering¡¦s Frontiers of Engineering Program in 2002,and she is currently a member of DARPA¡¦s Information Systems and Technology (ISAT) study group. Her research interests are in hybrid systems,air traffic control automation, fight management system analysis and design,and modeling and analysis of biological cell networks.

Ilya Kolmanovsky studied as an undergraduate at Moscow Aviation Institute in Russia. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Aerospace Engineering in 1993 and 1995, respectively, and his M.A. in Mathematics in 1995, all from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 1996 Dr. Kolmanovsky joined Ford Research Laboratory of Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan as a Technical Specialist. At Ford he has been conducting research on control, modeling and systems development of advanced technology automotive gasoline and diesel powertrains, and is presently a Staff Technical Specialist. Dr. Kolmanovsky has also made contributions to nonlinear control of non-holonomic systems with applications to multi-body spacecraft, nonlinear control of systems with pointwise-in-time state and control constraints, control of systems with complex dynamics, including switching systems, stochastic systems, systems with delays and systems described by partial differential equations.

Dr. Kolmanovsky has published over a hundred conference and journal articles in the areas of control and automotive systems technology. He holds nineteen U.S. patents. Dr. Kolmanovsky has served in the past as an Associate Editor of IEEE Control Systems Society Conference Editorial Board and was a program committee member of two American Control Conferences. He is presently serving as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology.