Electrical Engineer Receives Eckman Award for Research in Control Theory

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Jorge Poveda, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, has been named the recipient of the 2023 Donald P. Eckman Award by the American Automatic Control Council (AACC). The award annually recognizes outstanding engineers younger than 35 years in the field of automatic control.

Poveda’s research involves designing and analyzing control algorithms that are high-performing and can adapt to changes or disturbances in their environment. Such algorithms are aimed at enabling safe, optimal and autonomous operations of what are known as cyber-physical systems. These systems fuse together the digital and physical worlds, integrating computational systems into physical objects. Examples of cyber-physical systems include the power grid, transportation systems, automated agricultural systems, mobile robots, and social networks.

Poveda was recognized for his “outstanding contributions to control and real-time optimization of hybrid dynamical systems, including model-free and extremum seeking control, adaptive feedback optimization, and networked decision-making.”

Prior to joining UC San Diego in 2022, Poveda was an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is an alumnus of the University of Los Andes, Colombia, where he received double B.S. degrees in electronics and mechanical engineering, and an MSc (magna cum laude) degree in electrical engineering. Poveda received his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from UC Santa Barbara. He later was a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University.  Poveda’s work has also been recognized with the NSF CAREER award and the Young Investigator Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Past Eckman award recipients include Behrouz Touri, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.