Rate My Professor Petar V. Kokotovic

Petar V. Kokotovic is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the College of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in 1958 and 1963, respectively, from the University of Belgrade Faculty of Electrical Engineering, and a Ph.D. in 1965 from the USSR Academy of Sciences. Following his arrival in the United States in 1965, he was a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for 25 years, where he was appointed the Grainger Endowed Chair in 1990 and awarded the D.C. Drucker Eminent Faculty Award in 1987. In 1991, Kokotovic joined UCSB and founded the Center for Control, Dynamical Systems and Computation, serving as its director until 2003. He has also served as a long-term industrial consultant for computer controls at Ford and power system stability at General Electric.

Kokotovic specializes in control theory and applications, making pioneering contributions to adaptive control, nonlinear control, singular perturbation techniques, and large-scale systems. He has mentored 30 Ph.D. students and 20 postdoctoral researchers, co-authoring with them numerous papers and ten books. Among his key publications are Nonlinear and Adaptive Control Design (1995, with M. Krstić and I. Kanellakopoulos), Singular Perturbation Methods in Control: Analysis and Design (1999, with H. K. Khalil and J. O'Reilly), Constructive Nonlinear Control (2012, with R. Sepulchre and M. Janković), Systematic Design of Adaptive Controllers for Feedback Linearizable Systems (1991, with I. Kanellakopoulos and A. S. Morse), and Robust Nonlinear Control Design (2008, with R. A. Freeman). His influence is evident in the success of his students, including IEEE Fellows. Kokotovic's honors include election to the National Academy of Engineering (1996), IEEE Fellow (1980), IEEE Control Systems Award (1995), Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award (2002), IFAC Quazza Medal (1990), IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal (2001), two IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control Outstanding Paper Awards (1984 and 1993), and foreign membership in the Russian Academy of Sciences (2011).