René Boel

Biography

René K. Boel received a degree in electromechanical engineering (1969) and in nuclear engineering (1970) from Ghent University, an M.Sc. (1972), and a Ph.D. degree (1974) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, U.S.A.

He is currently a professor at the SYSTeMS Research group, School of Engineering, Ghent University, Ghent (Belgium). He was a research fellow of the F.W.O.-Vlaanderen (Flemish Foundation for Scientific research) until September 2000.

He has held temporary appointments at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences-University of California Berkeley, the department of Technical Cybernetics NTH-Trondheim Norway, the Mathematics department of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the Mathematics and Statistics department of Bell laboratories Murray Hill (N.J.), the Department of Computing and Control of Imperial College London, the Department of Systems Engineering, Australian National University, Canberra, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Newcastle, Australia, and the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department, Melbourne University.

He has been an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Automatica, Journal of Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry, and is currently Department Editor for the Journal on Discrete Event Dynamic Systems, Associate Editor for IET Control Theory and Applications, and member of the editorial board of Systems and Control Letters. He was chairman of the Steering Committee for the Workshop on Discrete Event Systems (2000-2002 and 2006-2008), and he has been on the organising committee for a large number of conferences in control, statistics, and communication networks.

His current research interests are in the field of distributed control and estimation for stochastic, discrete event and hybrid systems, with applications to traffic networks and power systems, as well as in bioinformatics.