Bruce Francis

Award Received:

IEEE CSS Hendrik W. Bode Lecture Prize

Date Awarded:

2014

Biography

Bruce Francis obtained his B.A.Sc. and M.Eng. degrees in Mechanical Engineering and his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto in 1969, 1970, and 1975, respectively. His PhD advisor was Murray Wonham. He received a two-year NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship in 1975. He spent the first year in the EECS Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and the second year in the Control and Management Systems Division, University of Cambridge. In 1977 he received postdoctoral support in Montreal from George Zames at McGill and M. Vidyasagar at Concordia. This turned into a faculty position in the EE Department at McGill during 1978-79. He spent 1979-81 at Yale University. He returned to Canada in 1981, to the University of Waterloo. Finally, he returned to his alma mater, the University of Toronto, in 1984. He retired in 2011 and is now Emeritus Professor. He received four teaching awards at U of T. He became a Fellow of the IEEE in 1988 and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering in 2010. He was a co-recipient of two Outstanding Paper Awards for papers appearing in the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and a co-recipient (with Doyle, Glover, and Khargonekar) of the 1991 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize Award. He held a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellowship in 1989, and gave the Peter Sagirow Seminar at the University of Stuttgart in 2010. He received the Bode Lecture Prize in 2014 and the IEEE Control Systems Award in 2015.

Citation:

For seminal contributions to robust and H-infinity control, linear control theory, sampled-data control, and distributed robotics