S. Shankar Sastry was the director of CITRIS from 2005–07 and now serves on the CITRIS advisory board. He previously served as the faculty director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies and was chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, from January 2001 through June 2004. From 1999–2001, he was on leave from Berkeley as director of the Information Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). From 1996–99, he was the director of the Electronics Research Laboratory at UC Berkeley.
Sastry received his Ph.D. degree in 1981 from the University of California, Berkeley. He was on the faculty of MIT as assistant professor from 1980–82 and Harvard University as a chaired Gordon McKay professor in 1994. His areas of personal research are resilient network control systems, cybersecurity, autonomous and unmanned systems (especially aerial vehicles), computer vision, nonlinear and adaptive control, control of hybrid and embedded systems, and software. Most recently he has been concerned with critical infrastructure protection, in the context of establishing a 10-year NSF Science and Technology Center called TRUST (Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technologies).