Baillieul Named Inaugural Fellow of SIAM
Professor John Baillieul has been selected as a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The organization instituted its fellowship program last year, and Baillieul is among its first class of fellows.
SIAM promotes interaction among mathematicians and other scientific and technological communities that apply mathematics in their fields. It established the fellows program to recognize members who have made outstanding contributions to their disciplines and to support their advancement in academia and society. Baillieul is one of 183 Fellows named from among the more than 12,000 individual members of SIAM around the globe.
“The announcement of the first class of SIAM Fellows is an important milestone for the applied mathematics and computational science community,” said SIAM President Douglas N. Arnold. “Reflecting the diversity of the SIAM membership, these men and women come from five continents and work in academia, industry and government laboratories. Advancing the frontiers of research in branches of mathematics as distinct as number theory and partial differential equations, these professionals have applied their work to endeavors ranging from mining to medicine. Their contributions are truly outstanding.”
Baillieul joined the College of Engineering faculty in 1985 and holds professorial appointments in the Mechanical and Electrical & Computer Engineering departments. His research focuses on robotics, control of mechanical systems and mathematical system theory. He is also an IEEE fellow and has won the IEEE Third Millennium Medal for outstanding contributions to his field. In 2007, Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen named Baillieul the College of Engineering’s first Distinguished Lecturer, for which Baillieul delivered a talk on “The Evolving Applications of Control Theory to Devices, Networks and Life Itself.”
Baillieul has served as editor-in-chief and on editorial boards of numerous industry journals, gaining extensive experience in editorial work and scholarly publishing. He began overseeing SIAM’s “Journal on Control and Optimization” in 2006 and will continue through 2011 to steer its transition to more online content and less print. Previously, he edited the leading journal in the same field, published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
“It would be unusual for someone to do what I did, to be editor-in-chief for two very similar journals, but I did it because I am interested in learning this other system,” Baillieul said. “I am just interested in all the changes going on in scholarly publishing with the web. The whole journal is available electronically. It’s been good what’s happened, but it’s one of the tough transition this journal, and all of them, will undergo.”
In July, Baillieul will attend the SIAM annual meeting in Denver where he will be recognized for his fellowship at an awards luncheon.