Skinner Professor,  School of

Engineering and Applied Science

Dept. of Electrical & Systems  Engineering

Bryan 201, Box 1127

1 Brookings Drive

St. Louis, MO-63130

Tel: (314) 935-5565

Links to Course Resources

ESE 441 Control Systems (Fall 2008)

ESE 554 Nonlinear Feedback Systems (Fall 2008)

ESE 553 An Introduction to Nonlinear Systems (Spring 2008)

Professor Byrnes received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1975 from the University of Massachusetts under the tutelage of Marshall Stone. He began his academic career at the University of Utah as an Instructor of Mathematics. In 1978, he joined the faculty of Harvard University as an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Mathematics and the Division of Applied Science. He was promoted to Associate Professor on the Gordon McKay Endowment in 1983. In 1984, he joined the Arizona State University, where he served as a full professor of both Electrical Engineering and Mathematics. In 1986, he was appointed an adjunct professor of Optimization and Systems Theory at the Royal Institute of Technology. At Washington University, he served as Chair of the Department of Systems Science and Mathematics from 1989 to 1991, when he assumed the position of Dean of Engineering and Applied Science, a position he retired from after 15 years of service.  
 
Professor Byrnes is the author of over 250 technical papers and books and has held visiting positions in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, the Academy of Sciences of the former USSR, and the United States. He has been granted four U.S. patents and has received over $5M of competitively awarded grants. 
 
In 1991, he received, with his collaborator and co-author Alberto Isidori, the George Axelby Award for the Best Paper in the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control for the period 1989 to 1991. He received the Axelby prize again in 2003, for his work with Anders Lindquist and Tryphon Georgiou. In 1993, he and Alberto Isidori received a prize from the IFAC for the Best Paper appearing in the journal Automatica during the period 1991 to 1993. In 1998 Professor Byrnes was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology and in 2002 and was named a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. In 2005, he was award the Reid prize from SIAM for his contributions to Control Theory and Differential Equations and he is the recipient of the IEEE 2008 Hendrik Bode Prize Lecture Award. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and of the Academy of Sciences of St. Louis. 
 
Professor Byrnes has served on many civic, corporate and professional boards. In St. Louis, he has been especially active in economic development. Over twenty companies were launched from the School of Engineering and Applied Science while he was dean. For more than a decade, he served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Center for Emerging Technologies, a highly successful, nationally recognized not-for-profit incubator for start-up companies, where he is now Chairman Emeritus. He also served as Chairman of the Technology Gateway Alliance, an alliance of more than 250 companies in the biotech and IT sectors, and as a member of the Board of Directors of the RCGA of St. Louis.

RESEARCH
Professor Byrnes's research interests include the analysis and design of feedback systems, the estimation and filtering of signals and systems, as well as the application of nonlinear dynamics and geometry to problems arising in engineering and science. 

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