The Sloan Research Fellowships seek to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise.  These two-year fellowships are awarded yearly to 118 researchers in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field.

	Congratulations to Francesco Bullo, Sonia Martinez (UCSD) and Jorge Cortes (UCSD) 2008 IEEE Control Systems Magazine Outstanding Paper Award December 2008

Francesco Bullo (ME), together with Sonia Martinez (UCSD, formerly UCSB post-doctoral associate) and Jorge Cortes (UCSD) have won the 2008 IEEE Control Systems Magazine Outstanding Paper Award. The award is given to a paper published in the Control Systems Magazine in the two calendar years preceding the award, and is based on the impact on the field of systems and control, and the benefit to the Control Systems Society members. The authors received the award on December 10, at the awards ceremony in the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, held Dec. 9-11 in Cancun, Mexico.

	Congratulations to Andy Teel Andy Teel delivers plenary lecture at the CDC in Cancun, Mexico December, 2008

Andy Teel (ECE) delivered an outstanding plenary lecture at the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in Cancun, Mexico. Andy's plenary lecture, titled "Hybrid Dynamical Systems and Robust Feedback Control", was presented before several hundred conference attendees on Dec. 9 and was very well received.

Andy's lecture emphasized a dynamical systems approach to hybrid systems. It described a modeling framework and a set of structural properties under which the dynamic behavior of a hybrid system was robust. Here, robustness means that small perturbations to the system lead to correspondingly small changes in the qualitative behavior of the system. Andy showed that the properties that yield robustness also confer to hybrid systems many classical stability analysis tools from continuous-time and discrete-time nonlinear systems. These and other hybrid-specific tools serve as the genesis for several hybrid feedback control algorithms. A selection of analysis tools and control algorithms were presented to illustrate recent advances in the field of hybrid systems.

	Congratulations to Bassam Bamieh, Frank Doyle and João Hespanha IEEE Fellows January 2008

Congratulations to Bassam Bamieh, Frank Doyle, and João Hespanha for being elevated to IEEE Fellow effective January 1, 2008. The total number of IEEE Fellows in a single year is no more than 0.1 percent of the total voting membership, so this is one of the Institute's most prestigious honors.

Bassam Bamieh's citation reads:
"for contributions to robust, sampled-data and distributed control"

Frank Doyle's citation reads:
"for contributions to nonlinear process control and analysis for biological systems"

João Hespanha's citation reads:
"for contributions to stability techniques for switched and hybrid systems"

	Congratulations to Brad Paden AIMBE Fellow November 2007

Brad Paden has been elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). The citation reads "For outstanding contributions towards the development of magnetically levitated rotary blood pumps for adult and pediatric heart failure patients." Fellows are among the top two percent of the medical and biological engineering community comprising AIMBE.

	Congratulations to Frank Doyle Plenary Speaker at the 2008 IFAC World Congress November 2007

Frank Doyle has been selected as a Plenary Speaker at the 2008 IFAC World Congress to be held July 6-11 in Seoul, Korea.

	Congratulations to Igor Mezic Igor Mezic co-leads $12.5 million DARPA University-Industry Consortium December 29 , 2006

Defense Advanced Research Program Agency (DARPA) has awarded a 3-year, $12.5 million contract to a consortium of Universities and industrial partners, with UCSB as the lead academic partner. The contract is for research on the topic of robust uncertainty management in large networks exhibiting complex dynamics. Funded by DARPA's Defense Sciences Office (DSO) by Program Manager Dr. Carey Schwartz, the contract objectives are to develop a set of mathematical tools and computational algorithms for analysis of uncertainty propagation in large defense and industrial networks that exhibit nonlinear dynamics.

The project is lead by UCSB Professor Igor Mezic and United Technologies Research Center Technical Fellow Dr. Andrzej Banaszuk. Participating institutions include, besides UCSB and United Technologies, Caltech (PI: Jerrold E. Marsden), Yale (PI: Ronald Coifman), Stanford (PI: Matt West and Sanjay Lall) and Princeton (PI: Yannis Kevrekidis). The whole team of
researchers will consist of approximately 35 people. The proposed set of techniques that the team will develop is dubbed DYNARUM - which stands for Dynamic Network Analysis for Robust Uncertainty Management. It relies on a powerful set of mathematical techniques from Dynamical Systems Theory, Graph Theory and Operator Theory.

The UCSB-UTRC-Caltech part of the team received seed funding from DARPA for research on this topic 3 years ago. The research within that project lead to a redesign of commercially available jet engines produced by Pratt and Whitney (one of United Technologies Companies). Redesigned engines exhibited robustly better stability margins than previous products.

	Congratulations to Duncan Mellichamp Santa Barbara Medal November 27, 2006

Duncan Mellichamp and his wife, Suzanne, have been awarded the Santa Barbara Medal. This prestigious medal has only been given 21 times since 1982 and only two other members of the UCSB faculty have received this distinction. see medal

	Congratulations to Mustafa Khammash IEEE Fellow November 27, 2006

Following a rigorous evaluation procedure, the IEEE Fellow Committee has selected Professor Mustafa Khammash as a recipient of one of the institutes most prestigious honors, elevation to IEEE Fellow, for contributions to robust control and its applications.

	Congratulations to João Hespanha 2006 George Axelby Award

Professor Joao Hespanha's paper on "Uniform stability of switched linear systems: extensions of LaSalle's Invariance Principle" has been selected for the 2006 George Axelby Award.

	Congratulations to Anurag Ganguli 2006 ACC Best Student Paper Award

CCDC student Anurag Ganguli's paper, "Distributed Deployment of Asynchronous Guards in Art Galleries," coathored by Jorge Cortes and Francesco Bullo, has been selected for the 2006 ACC Best Student Paper Award.

	Congratulations to Jeff Moehlis NSF CAREER Award May 11 , 2006

A young faculty member has received the prestigious CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of the early career development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century.
Jeffrey Moehlis, Professor of Mechanical and Environmental Engineering, will receive $400,000 to pursue a project entitled Dynamics of Individual and Coupled Oscillators.