Dean S. Shankar Sastry

Biography

S Sastry became Chair, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley in January, 2001, and held that position until 2004. Prior to that, he served as Director of the Information Technology Office at DARPA. From 1996-1999, he was the Director of the Electronics Research Laboratory at Berkeley, an organized research unit on the Berkeley campus conducting research in computer sciences and all aspects of electrical engineering. During his directorship from 1996-1999, extra-mural funding of the laboratory grew from $29M to $50M. Prof. Sastry also holds a joint professorship in the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and Bioengineering.

Prof. Sastry received his Ph.D. in 1981 from the University of California, Berkeley. He was on the faculty of MIT as assistant professor from 1980-1982 and at Harvard University as a chaired Gordon McKay professor in 1994. He has held visiting appointments at the Australian National University in Canberra, the University of Rome, Scuola Normale, and the University of Pisa, the CNRS laboratory LAAS in Toulouse (poste rouge), Professor Invite at Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (CNRS laboratory VERIMAG), and a Vinton Hayes Visiting fellow at the Center for Intelligent Control Systems at MIT. His areas of research are embedded and autonomous software, computer vision, and computation in novel substrates such as DNA, nonlinear and adaptive control, robotic telesurgery, control of hybrid systems, embedded systems, sensor networks and biological motor control.

Nonlinear Systems: Analysis, Stability and Control is Prof. Sastry's latest book, published by Springer-Verlag in 1999. He has coauthored over 250 technical papers and six books, including Adaptive Control: Stability, Convergence and Robustness (with M. Bodson, Prentice Hall, 1989) and A Mathematical Introduction to Robotic Manipulation (with R. Murray and Z. Li, CRC Press, 1994). He co-edited Hybrid Control II, Hybrid Control IV and Hybrid Control V (with P. Antsaklis, A. Nerode, and W. Kohn, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1995, 1997, and 1999, respectively), Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (with T.Henzinger, Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1998), and Essays in Mathematical Robotics (with Baillieul and Sussmann, Springer-Verlag IMA Series). Books on embedded software and structure from motion in computer vision are in progress.

Prof. Sastry served as associate editor for numerous publications, including: IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control; IEEE Control Magazine; IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems; the Journal of Mathematical Systems, Estimation and Control; IMA Journal of Control and Information; the International Journal of Adaptive Control and Signal Processing; and the Journal of Biomimetic Systems and Materials.

Prof. Sastry was elected into the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 "for pioneering contributions to the design of hybrid and embedded systems." He also received the President of India Gold Medal in 1977, the IBM Faculty Development Award for 1983-1985, the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985, the Eckman Award of the American Automatic Control Council in 1990, an M.A. (honoris causa) from Harvard in 1994, Fellow of the IEEE in 1994, the distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology in 1999, and the David Marr prize for the best paper at the International Conference in Computer Vision in 1999.

He has supervised more than 45 doctoral students to completion and over 50 M.S. students. His students now occupy leadership roles in several locations, such as dean of engineering at Caltech, director of Information Systems Laboratory, Stanford, Army Research Office, and on the faculties of every major university in the United States.