Christos Cassandras

Christos G. Cassandras is Head of the Division of Systems Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University. He is also co-founder of Boston University’s Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE). He received degrees from YaleUniversity (B.S., 1977), Stanford University (M.S.E.E., 1978), and Harvard University (S.M., 1979; Ph.D., 1982). In 1982-84 he was with ITP Boston, Inc. where he worked on the design of automated manufacturing systems. In 1984-1996 he was a faculty member at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts/Amherst. He specializes in the areas of discrete event and hybrid systems, cooperative control, stochastic optimization, and computer simulation, with applications to computer and sensor networks, manufacturing systems, and transportation systems. He has published over 300 refereed papers in these areas, and five books. He has guest-edited several technical journal issues and serves on several journal Editorial Boards. In addition to his academic activities, he has worked extensively with industrial organizations on various systems integration projects and the development of decision-support software. He has most recently collaborated with The MathWorks, Inc. in the development of the discrete event and hybrid system simulator SimEvents®.

Dr. Cassandras was Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control from 1998 through 2009 and has also served as Editor for Technical Notes and Correspondence and Associate Editor. He was the 2012 President of the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) and has served as Vice President for Publications. He has also served on the IEEE CSS Board of Governors, as Chair of several conferences, and chaired the CSS Technical Committee on Control Theory. He has been a plenary speaker at various international conferences, including the American Control Conference in 2001 and the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in 2002, and an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer (2001-04). He is the recipient of several awards, including the 2011 IEEE Control Systems Technology Award, the Distinguished Member Award of the IEEE Control Systems Society (2006), the 1999 Harold Chestnut Prize (IFAC Best Control Engineering Textbook) for Discrete Event Systems: Modeling and Performance Analysis, a 2011 prize for the IBM/IEEE Smarter Planet Challenge competition for a “Smart Parking” system, a 1991 Lilly Fellowship and a 2012 Kern Fellowship. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the IFAC.