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KAUST Professor of Electrical Engineering Jeff S. Shamma​​​ has been elected as a fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC). The IFAC Fellow Award is given to eminent engineers, scientists, technical leaders or educators who have “made outstanding and extraordinary contributions,” according to the federation’s website. Specifically, Shamma was elected for his “contributions to linear parameter varying systems, multiagent systems, game theory, and robust control.”

Shamma and 33 co-selectees will be honored at the federation’s 20th triennial World Congress held in Toulouse, France, in July 2017. He joins a prestigious list of global academics, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) members and National Science Foundation (NSF) grant holders from top research institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford, ETH Zurich, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and others.

“This is peer recognition of a body of work—both my early work on robust control systems as well as my more recent work on multiagent systems,” said Shamma.

Shamma earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in 1983 and a Ph.D. in systems science and engineering from MIT in 1988. He is the recipient of an NSF Young Investigator Award, the American Automatic Control Council Donald P. Eckman Award and the Mohammed Dahleh Award, and he has been an IEEE Fellow since 2006. He is currently the deputy editor-in-chief for IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems and associate editor for the journal Games.

“My work over the last 10 years has been focused on distributed decision making, and KAUST gives me the chance to not just work on algorithms, but also to explore various applications and experimental testbeds,” said Shamma.

Shamma is currently the program chair of Electrical Engineering in the Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Science and Engineering Division at KAUST and the director of the Robotics, Intelligent Systems & Control lab (RISC)​. He is the former Julian T. Hightower Chair in Systems & Control in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. He has also held faculty positions at the University of Minnesota, The University of Texas at Austin and the University of California, Los Angeles.