BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Marwan A. Simaan joined the University of Central Florida in 2008 as the Florida 21^st 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 member 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.