He came to the United States in 1965 and was professor at the University of Illinois for 25 years.[2] He joined the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1991, where he was the founding and long-serving director of the Center for Control, Dynamical Systems and Computation.[2] This center has become a role model of cross-disciplinary research and education. One of the Center’s achievements is a fully integrated cross-disciplinary graduate program for electrical and computer, mechanical and environmental, and chemical engineering fields.
At UC Santa Barbara his group developed constructive nonlinear control methods and applied them, with colleagues from MIT, Caltech and United Technologies Research Center, to new jet engine designs. As a long-term industrial consultant, he has contributed to computer controls at Ford and to power system stability at General Electric.[3]
For his control systems contributions, Professor Kokotovic has been recognized with the triennial Quazza Medal from the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), the Control Systems Field Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the 2002 Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award from the American Automatic Control Council, with the citation "for pioneering contributions to control theory and engineering, and for inspirational leadership as mentor, advisor, and lecturer over a period spanning four decades."[4]
Kokotovic was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1996 for the development and applications of large-scale systems analysis and adaptive control theory.[citation needed] He is a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Fellow of IEEE. His honors also include the D.C. Drucker Eminent Faculty Award and two IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control outstanding paper awards.
Dr. Kokotovic has co-authored numerous papers and ten books.[4]
