Miroslav Krstić stands as a preeminent figure in control theory and academic leadership, currently serving as Distinguished Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He simultaneously holds the position of Senior Associate Vice Chancellor for Research, overseeing Organized Research Units and academic researcher appointments across the institution. As the founding director of the Cymer Center for Control Systems and Dynamics established in 2008, Krstić has cultivated an environment for cutting-edge interdisciplinary research. His academic foundation includes a five-year BSc degree from the University of Belgrade's School of Electrical Engineering in 1989, followed by doctoral studies at UC Santa Barbara where his 1994 PhD dissertation earned the campuswide Lancaster Best Dissertation Award and became a seminal work in control theory.
Dr. Krstić's transformative contributions to nonlinear and adaptive control have fundamentally reshaped the discipline, with his co-authored monograph Nonlinear and Adaptive Control Design (1995) recognized as one of the two most cited research texts in control theory. His pioneering development of backstepping control methods for partial differential equations, detailed in the award-winning textbook Backstepping Control of PDEs (2008), has revolutionized the management of complex physical systems including turbulent fluid flows. With over 77,000 citations according to Google Scholar, his research spans distributed parameter systems, delay compensation, stochastic control, and extremum seeking, with impactful applications across aerospace systems, automotive technology, energy storage solutions, and biotechnology. His single-authored work Delay Compensation for Nonlinear, Adaptive, and PDE Systems (2009) further expanded the theoretical boundaries of control methodology.
Recognized as the world's top control theory author by ScholarGPS among over 750,000 researchers in the field, Krstić has been elected Fellow of seven prestigious scientific societies including IEEE, IFAC, ASME, SIAM, AAAS, IET (UK), and AIAA, while also serving as a foreign member of the Academy of Engineering of Serbia. His exceptional contributions have earned numerous top honors including the ASME Oldenburger Medal, Bellman Award, SIAM Reid Prize, Nyquist Lecture Prize, and the Chestnut textbook prize, alongside early career recognition through the NSF CAREER, ONR Young Investigator, and PECASE awards. As the incoming Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (2026-), he continues to shape the intellectual direction of the field while mentoring the next generation of control theorists through his leadership at UC San Diego's research initiatives.
