Wassim Michael Haddad (born July 14, 1961) is a Lebanese-Greek-American applied mathematician, scientist, and engineer, with research specialization in the areas of dynamical systems and control. His research has led to fundamental breakthroughs in applied mathematics, thermodynamics, stability theory, robust control, dynamical system theory, and neuroscience. Haddad is a member of the faculty of the School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, where he holds the rank of Professor and Chair of the Flight Mechanics and Control Discipline. He is a member of the Academy of Nonlinear Sciences Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine for recognition of paramount contributions to the fields of nonlinear stability theory, nonlinear dynamical systems, and nonlinear control and an IEEE Fellow for contributions to robust, nonlinear, and hybrid control systems. He was awarded the Pendray Aerospace Literature Award by the AIAA in 2014.
Biography
Early life and education Haddad was born in Athens, Greece, to a Greek mother and Lebanese father. He attended a private British secondary school for his early education and the American Community Schools in Athens and Beirut, respectively, for his high school education. After completing his high school, where he was taught Greek, French, philosophy, and basic science and mathematics, in 1979 he entered the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department of the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Florida. Haddad received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from Florida Tech in 1983, 1984, and 1987, respectively, with specialization in dynamical systems and control. His doctoral research concentrated on fixed-architecture robust control design with applications to large flexible space structures and with Dennis S. Bernstein serving as his doctoral advisor.
Academic career From 1987 to 1994 Haddad served as a consultant for the Structural Controls Group of the Government Aerospace Systems Division, Harris Corporation, Melbourne, Florida. In 1988 he joined the faculty of the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at Florida Institute of Technology, where he founded and developed the Systems and Control Option within the graduate program and was instrumental in bolstering control systems activities within the Space Research Institute at the Florida Tech. Since 1994 he has been a member of the faculty in the School of Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Presidential Faculty Fellow In recognition for his "demonstrated excellence and continued promise in scientific and engineering research and in teaching future generations of students to extend and apply human knowledge," Professor Haddad was awarded the National Science Foundation Presidential Faculty Fellow Award in 1993. The award was bestowed by President Bill Clinton in a White House Rose Garden ceremony to recognize and support the scholarly activities of the "Nation's most outstanding science and engineering faculty" members.
Research Dr. Haddad's interdisciplinary research contributions are documented in over 550 archival journal and conference publications and seven books in the areas of science, mathematics, medicine, and engineering. His research in nonlinear robust and adaptive control, nonlinear dynamical system theory, large-scale systems, hierarchical nonlinear switching control, analysis and control of nonlinear impulsive and hybrid systems, adaptive and neuroadaptive control, system thermodynamics, thermodynamic modeling of mechanical and aerospace systems, network systems, expert systems, nonlinear analysis and control for biological and physiological systems, active control for clinical pharmacology, and mathematical neuroscience have placed him as one of the prominent scholars, educators, and technology developers in the aerospace, electrical, and biomedical engineering communities. His secondary interests include the history of science and mathematics, as well as natural philosophy.
Fixed-structure control design In a series of papers with D. S. Bernstein and D. C. Hyland in the mid-1980s on the subject of "optimal projection fixed-structure control," Haddad solved several important problems concerning the design of reduced-order optimally robust compensators and estimators for multivariable systems. Haddad's fixed-structure control framework provides the capability for simultaneously performing multiple design tradeoffs for multivariable systems with respect to competing constraints such as sensor noise, control effort, controller order, robustness, disturbance rejection, mean-square error, sample rate, and controller architecture. This approach provides the theoretical underpinning for the design of "industry standard" controllers that fully encompass classical design objectives within multivariable control theory. This work provided the foundation for numerous researchers in the 1990s to address advances in fixed-order control via Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs).
Mixed-norm multiobjective control design Haddad's work on the mixed-norm multiobjective controller synthesis problem and, specifically, the mixed H2/H∞ control problem, was the first to correctly and rigorously fully address the design of full- and reduced-order controllers for disturbance rejection that simultaneously account for narrow-band and wide-band disturbances without undue conservativeness. Haddad's seminal publications on the mixed-norm control problem spawned an extremely active area of research, with numerous papers being written by different research groups around the world that drew heavily on this foundational work.
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