Naomi Leonard (ECE Ph.D. ’94) Awarded Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award

ECE alumna Naomi Leonard (ECE Ph.D. ’94) has been awarded the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award from the American Automatic Control Council. Her citation for this award reads “forfundamental contributions to geometric control theory, networked multiagent systems, and for bridging control theory with ecological systems, neuroscience, and the arts.”

Leonard is the Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. In 2012, she was presented with the ECE Distinguished Alumni Award for contributions to control and dynamical systems. In 2015, she was inducted into A. James Clark School Innovation Hall of Fame for her research in the field of cooperative control of autonomous vehicles. To date, she is the only woman recognized with this honor.

While at UMD, Leonard was advised by Professor P.S. Krishnaprasad (ECE/ISR). Highly recognized for her research over the course of her career, she is a MacArthur Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recipient of the 2023 IEEE Control Systems Award,and a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the International Federation of Automatic Control, (IFAC), and the Society for Applied and Computational Mathematics (SIAM). Her current research focuses on dynamics, control, and learning for multi-agent systems on networks with application to multi-robot teams, collective animal behavior, and other distributed systems in technology, nature, and the arts.

The Bellman Award has been awarded annually since 1979. It is given in recognition of career contributions to the theory or application of automatic control and is the highest recognition of professional achievement for US Control systems engineers and scientists. It is named for Richard Ernest Bellman (1920-1984), an applied mathematician who introduced dynamic programming in 1953.

Published September 10, 2024