Khargonekar Inducted into University of Florida Hall of Fame
June 3, 2024 - UC Irvine Distinguished Professor and Vice Chancellor for Research Pramod Khargonekar has been inducted into the University of Florida’s (UF) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Hall of Fame. Khargonekar is one of 11 in the inaugural class who received the honor at an induction ceremony and dinner at University of Florida in April.
The ECE Hall of Fame recognizes alumni who have demonstrated institutional leadership, a long-term commitment to UF’s engineering program, and impactful research and inventions in the field of electrical or computer engineering. New members will be inducted annually.
“There is something particularly sweet about being honored by one’s alma mater,” said Khargonekar. “I am deeply humbled to be selected for this inaugural class of inductees into the UF ECE Department Hall of Fame.”
At the ceremony, Khargonekar was cited “for his brilliant, high-impact research contributions to theory and applications of systems and control. His early work was on mathematical control theory, specifically focusing on robust control analysis and design. In late 1980s, he made groundbreaking contributions to the state-space solution to the H-infinity control problem. This work is recognized to be the greatest theoretical achievement in the control systems field since the pioneering work of R. E. Kalman, Ph.D., in the 1960s.”
Khargonekar earned a master’s degree in mathematics and doctorate in electrical engineering from UF. His doctoral adviser was late Professor R. E. Kalman, one of the founding fathers of the field of modern control and system theory. His research contributions have spanned fundamental theory of control systems, as well as applications to semiconductor manufacturing, renewable electric grids and learning control systems for autonomy. He has held faculty positions at UF, the University of Minnesota and the University of Michigan, and he served as the University of Michigan’s electrical engineering and computer science chair from 1997-2001 until returning to UF as the engineering dean from 2001-09. Among his many appointments, he served as deputy director for technology at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy and as the assistant director of the National Science Foundation where he headed the Directorate of Engineering from 2013-16. He came to UCI in 2016.
– Lilith Christopher
