SOCIAL EVENTS
PROF. VADIM UTKIN HONORARY DOCTOR OF UNIVERSITY ROVIRA I VIRGILI
Prof. Vadim I. Utkin received the Honorary Doctor Degree of University Rovira i Virgili in November 2011 after a GAEI proposal. The overture in the Honorary Doctor ceremony was performed by Prof. Luis Martinez-Salamero.
Prof. Vadim I. Utkin graduated from Moscow Power Institute (Dipl. Eng.) and received a Ph.D. from the Institute of Control Sciences (Moscow, Russia). He was with the Institute of Control Sciences since 1960, and was Head of the Discontinuous Control Systems Laboratory from 1973 to 1994. He was Ford Chair of Electromechanical Systems from 1994 to 2002 at the Ohio State University.
Prof. Utkin is one of the originators of the concepts of Variable Structure Systems and Sliding Mode Control. He is an author of five books and more than 300 technical papers. In 1975-1978 he was in charge of an international project between his Institute and "Energoinvest", Sarajevo, on the sliding mode control of induction motors. He has worked on the control of D.C., induction, and synchronous drives using sliding mode techniques in metal-cutting machine tools, process control and electric cars. His current research interests are the control of infinite-dimensional plants (including flexible manipulators), sliding modes in discrete time systems, microprocessor implementation of sliding mode control, control of electric drives, alternators and power converters, robotics and motion control.
He is an Honorary Doctor of the University of Sarajevo (Yugoslavia, 1978) and IEEE Fellow. In 1972 he was awarded the Lenin Prize (the highest scientific award in the former USSR), Oldenburger medal of ASME (2003), Humboldt Award (Germany, 2005), elected as a Foreign member of Science and Art Academy of Bosnia and Herzegovina (2008).
Prof. Utkin was IPC chairman of 1990 IFAC Congress in Tallinn; now he is Associate Editor of "International Journal of Control".
Currently Prof. Utkin teaches courses on control principles for undergraduates (Principles of Automatic Control ), and courses in Optimal Control, State Methods for Analysis and Control of Dynamic Systems, and Sliding Mode Control in Electromechanical Systems at the graduate level.
Prof. Utkin has held visiting positions at universities in the USA, UK, Japan, Italy, Spain and Germany. He holds appointments in the Control Research Laboratory of the Department of Electrical Engineering and in the Department of Mechanical Engineering , where he teaches in the System Dynamics, Measurements and Control program.