Frank Allgöwer

Biography

Frank Allgöwer is director of the Institute for Systems Theory and Automatic Control and professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Stuttgart in Germany.

He studied Engineering Cybernetics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Stuttgart and the University of California at Los Angeles respectively. He received his Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Stuttgart. Prior to his present appointment, he held a professorship in the electrical engineering department at ETH Zurich. He also held visiting positions at the California Institute of Technology, the NASA Ames Research Center, the DuPont Company and the University of California at Santa Barbara.

His main interests in research and teaching are in the area of systems and control with emphasis on the development of new methods for the analysis and control of nonlinear systems. Of equal importance to the theoretical developments are practical applications and the experimental evaluation of benefits and limitations of the developed methods. Applications range from control of atomic force microscopes and biomedical applications to the control of roller coasters and systems biology.

At present Frank Allgöwer is Editor for the journal Automatica, Associate Editor of the Journal of Process Control and is on the editorial board of several further journals including the Journals of Robust and Nonlinear Control, IET Control Theory and Applications, Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering, the journal Chemical Engineering Science and the Springer Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences Series. Among others he serves on the scientific council of the German Society for Measurement and Control (GMA), is on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Control System Society, is chairman of the IFAC Technical Committee on Nonlinear Systems, is member of the IFAC Policy Committee and chairman of the International Affairs Committee of IEEE CSS and has been a member of the council of the European Union Control Association.

Frank Allgöwer has been organizer or co-organizer of several international conferences and has published over 150 scientific articles. Frank Allgöwer received several recognitions for his work including the IEEE distinguished lectureship, the appointment as IFAC Fellow and the Leibniz prize, which is the most prestigious prize in science and engineering awarded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).