Sontag Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
University Distinguished Professor Eduardo Sontag, ECE/BioE, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his career that has made breakthroughs in the mathematics of nonlinear and complex systems, with repercussions for biomedicine, systems biology, and neural networks.
Eduardo Sontag, University Distinguished Professor of electrical and computer engineering, and bioengineering, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his career that has made breakthroughs in the mathematics of nonlinear and complex systems, with repercussions for biomedicine, systems biology, and neural networks. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is one of the most prestigious organizations a scholar can be invited into. An interdisciplinary organization, it “convenes leaders from every field of human endeavor” to address the issues facing the world and to tackle new ideas.
Sontag’s work has focused on determining how to “model systems mathematically and how one can steer them in order to achieve desired purposes,” a field more broadly called control theory. These systems— and the purposes they might be steered toward—are numerous. The unifying concept in his work is the idea that states of systems change over time, such as the variables describing the dynamics of an airplane or a car in the context of a self-driving vehicle, or a cell in the human body. His research is on theoretical foundations and underlying mathematics, developing conceptual principles and algorithms which enable applications by scientists and practitioners in different fields.
Sontag is a Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), American Mathematical Society, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Other prestigious honors include the IFAC Technical Committee Award on Non-Linear Control Systems, which is the “highest distinction on nonlinear control systems research,” the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award—the highest recognition in control theory and engineering in the U.S., the W. T. and Idalia Reid Prize presented by SIAM, the IEEE Control Systems Field Award, and the IEEE CSS Hendrik W. Bode Lecture Prize.