S. Shankar Sastry
Dean, College of Engineering, University of California, Berkeley
S. Shankar Sastry is dean of the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley. Prior to serving as dean he was director of CITRIS (Center for Information Technology in the Interests of Society) an interdisciplinary center spanning UC Berkeley, Davis, Merced and Santa Cruz. In Februrary 2007, he was appointed the faculty co-director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He chaired the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley from January, 2001 through June 2004, he was director of the Information Technology Office at DARPA from 1999 to early 2001 and director of the Electronics Research Laboratory at Berkeley, conducting research in electrical, computer sciences and engineering from 1996-1999.
Dr. Sastry received his Ph.D. in 1981 from the UC Berkeley. He was on the faculty of MIT as assistant professor from 1980-82 and at Harvard University as a chaired Gordon Mc Kay professor in 1994. He has held visiting appointments at the Australian National University, Canberra the University of Rome, Scuola Normale and University of Pisa, the CNRS laboratory LAAS in Toulouse (poste rouge), Professor Invite at Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (CNRS laboratory VERIMAG), and as a Vinton Hayes visiting fellow at the Center for Intelligent Control Systems at MIT. His areas of personal research are embedded and autonomous software for unmanned systems (especially aerial vehicles), computer vision, computation in novel substrates such as quantum computing, nonlinear and adaptive control, robotic telesurgery, control of hybrid and embedded systems, network embedded systems and software. Most recently he has been concerned with cybersecurity and critical infrastructure protecton, and has helped establish an NSF Science and Technology Center, TRUST (Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technologies).
Dr. Sastry was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) in 2004. He is on the Technical Advisory Group of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He was on the US Air Force Science Board from 2003-2006, and is chairman of the board of the International Computer Science Institute. He is also a member of the boards of the Federation of American Scientists and ESCHER (Embedded Systems Consortium for Hybrid and Embedded Research). Among his many honors, he received the President of India Gold Medal in 1977, the IBM Faculty Development award for 1983-1985, the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985, the Eckman Award of the of the American Automatic Control Council in 1990, the Ragazzini Award for Distinguished Accomplishments in teaching in 2005, an M. A. (honoris causa) from Harvard in 1994, Fellow of the IEEE in 1994, the distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology in 1999, and the David Marr prize for the best paper at the International Conference in Computer Vision in 1999.
He has supervised more than 50 doctoral students to completion and over 50 MS students. His students now occupy leadership roles in several locations and on the faculties of many major universities in the United States and abroad.
