BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Marwan A. Simaan
joined the University of Central Florida in 2008 as the Florida 21st
Century Chair and Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science. In 2009 he served as
Interim Dean and then Dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science
until July 1, 2012. Prior to joining the University of Central Florida he was
the Bell of PA/Bell Atlantic Professor and former Chairman of the Department of
Electrical Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh which he joined in
1976. He received the BS degree from the American University of Beirut (AUB), the MS degree from the University of
Pittsburgh (PITT) and the PhD degree from
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
all in Electrical Engineering. He is a member of the National Academy of
Engineering (NAE), a Life Fellow of the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE),
a Life Fellow of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE),
a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Fellow of the American Institute for
Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE),
a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) and a Fellow of the
Electromagnetics Academy (EMA). He is also an Honorary Member of Phi Eta Sigma, the National Freshmen Honor Society.
Dr. Simaan’s research is highly interdisciplinary in nature and
covers a broad spectrum of topics in dynamic games, control systems, and signal
processing. In the past 48 years or so,
he has worked on a wide range of research projects with researchers from
several disciplines including biomedical, mechanical, and materials
engineering, as well as with physicists, geophysicists, mathematicians,
computer scientists and economists. In dynamic games, he was one of the
first researchers in 1973 to introduce the concept of Leader-Follower
Stackelberg strategies in dynamic games. His work in this area is considered as
the foundation for the Time Inconsistency theory in dynamic games that
transformed the field of behavioral economics in the 1980s and 1990s. His more
recent work includes applications in economic decision-making, military mission
planning, target tracking, and cooperative control of teams of autonomous and
semi-autonomous unmanned vehicles. In control systems, he has worked on a
variety of theoretical and applied problems in optimal control and dynamic
optimization. More recently, for the
past 20 years or so, he has been involved in two applied control projects. The first began in the 1990s as a result of
collaboration with bioengineering faculty in the schools of engineering and
medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and involves modeling and control of
the continuous flow Left Ventricular Assists Device (LVAD Project) for patients with congestive
heart failure. The second started in the early 2000s as a result of
interactions with the ALCOA Research Center in Pittsburgh and has focused on
improving the performance and efficiency of cold and hot tandem metal rolling
processes using modern optimal control theory (Metals
Project). In signal processing, his
research in the 1980s and 1990s has largely been due to collaborations with
Shell and Gulf Oil Research Centers and has focused mainly on geophysical
signal processing including problems in wavelet deconvolution, array signal
processing, vertical seismic profiling, beamforming, pattern recognition, and
AI-based signal and image processing.
His research activities have has been funded by NSF, DARPA, AFOSR, ONR,
NIH, and a variety of industrial sources including Gulf Oil, AlCOA, and Westinghouse. Among his publications are 5 books
(1 co-authored and 4 edited/co-edited), 60 co-edited journal issues, more than
360 publications (135 archival journal papers and book chapters, and 228 papers
in conference proceedings), and 24 industry technical reports. His
refereed papers appeared in 54 different Journals including 17 different IEEE
Transactions and Journals.
Dr. Simaan has
been active in professional service. He
currently serves or has served on numerous professional Editorial Boards
including the PROCEEDINGS of the IEEE, the IEEE Press, the IEEE
Access, the IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, the IEEE
Transactions on Circuits and Systems-Part II, the IEEE Systems Journal, the
Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications (JOTA), the Journal of
Circuits, Systems and Computers, and the Journal on Integrated Computer-Aided
Engineering. He also served as series editor of Advances in Geophysical
Data Processing for JAI Press, Inc. (1983-92), and co-editor of the Journal of
Multidimensional Systems and Signal Processing: Springer (1989-04).
In 2005 he
served as chair of the NAE Electronics Engineering Peer Committee for the 2006
Election and he subsequently served a three year term on the NAE
Committee-on-Membership (2007-2010). He served three times on the IEEE Fellow
Committee (1990-93, 2002-04 and 2010-14), the IEEE Education Medal Committee
(2010 -15) which he chaired (2010-14), the IEEE Prize Papers and Graduate
Fellowships Committee (2001-04), and the AACC Awards Committee (1994-99) which
he chaired (1997-99). He also served as an EE Program Evaluator for ABET, the
Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (1993-98 & 2000-07) and
is currently serving as Secretary and Member of the Steering Group of Section
M (Engineering Section AAAS-M
) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Dr. Simaan
received numerous teaching awards from Eta Kappa Nu
and IEEE Student chapters at the University of Pittsburgh. He also received the School of Engineering
Board of Visitors Faculty Award for excellence in research (1986), the Beitle-Veltri Memorial Teaching Award (1990), and was
elected to the Engineering Hall of Fame (2002). He is the only faculty in
the ECE department at the University of Pittsburgh and the only alumnus of the
department to ever be elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He received four best paper awards from the
IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (1985), the Sigma Xi, Alcoa Chapter
(1988), and the IEEE Industry Applications Society (1999, 2012). In
1995 he was named a Distinguished Alumnus of the Department of Electrical &
Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. In 2007 he received the IEEE William E. Sayle II Award for Achievement
in Education and in 2008 he received the College of Engineering at the
University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana Award for Distinguished Service in
Engineering.
Dr. Simaan is a
registered Professional Engineer (PE) in Pennsylvania.