Rotea is new head of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering

Mario A. Rotea has joined the College of Engineering as the new head of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department.

Rotea was previously a professor in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue University in Indiana and the program director for Control Systems in the Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation, Directorate of Engineering, at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Arlington, Va. Recipient of an NSF Young Investigator Award in 1993, Rotea was one of the top five undergraduate teachers in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics several times.

“We are very fortunate and excited that Dr. Rotea is joining us,” says Mike Malone, dean of the College of Engineering. “His personal academic accomplishments are a terrific addition to the faculty. Coupled with his industrial and administrative experience, we have a fantastic addition to our academic leadership.”

Rotea has been very active in the development and transition of advanced methods for control systems analysis and design in industry, with applications that include flutter control and vibration analysis in gas turbine engines, noise and vibration control in helicopters, and chatter suppression in machine tools. His research lies in the optimization and control of dynamical systems, with broad applicability to complex engineered systems and he has made fundamental contributions in estimation and control theory. Rotea’s research is currently focused on the development of health management systems for electric machines in air vehicles and the development of improved algorithms for model predictive control.

Rotea was recently elected a fellow in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for his “contributions to robust and optimal control of multivariable systems,” an honor the organization describes as recognizing a person with an extraordinary record of accomplishments. His research has appeared in more than 40 journal publications and book chapters and 60 conference publications, and his work has been cited some 700 times in scholarly journals. Rotea is also a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics; an elected member of the board of governors of the IEEE Control Systems Society and has been on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and served on the awards committee of the American Automatic Control Council.

Rotea has a master of science in electrical engineering and a doctorate in control science and dynamical systems from the University of Minnesota.

May 10, 2007.

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