Morse Awarded the Giorgio Quazza Medal

A. Stephen Morse, the Dudley Professor of Electrical Engineering, has been awarded the Giorgio Quazza Medal by the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC).

The Quazza Medal is one of IFAC’s major awards and is conferred every three years to recognize outstanding lifetime contributions to conceptual foundations in the field of systems and control. Morse was recognized for “fundamental contributions to geometric control theory, adaptive and logic-based switching control, and distributed sensing and control." The presentation of the award will take place at the 22nd IFAC World Congress Opening Ceremony in Yokohama, Japan next July.

Morse was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2002. He is the 1999 recipient of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics (IEEE) Control Systems Award and the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award from the American Automatic Control Council among others. Morse is well known for his work in linear systems theory, adaptive control, and network science. Early in his career, he co-authored a field-defining paper on linear geometric control which was subsequently cited by the IEEE Control Systems Society as one of the 25 most influential papers published in the field of automatic control in the twentieth century. In 2003 he co-authored the widely referenced paper Coordination of Groups of Mobile Autonomous Agents Using Nearest Neighbor Rules, which created a new subfield and served to explain the emergent swarming behavior of a system of self-driven particles.