Rate My Professor Chris Damaren

Christopher J. Damaren is Professor and Director of the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) in the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering. A three-time alumnus of the University of Toronto, he received his BASc in Engineering Science (Aerospace Option) in 1985, MASc in 1987, and PhD in 1990 from UTIAS, where his doctoral work focused on control systems for flexible spacecraft. Prior to his current roles, Damaren served as Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering at Royal Roads Military College from 1990 to 1995 and as Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Canterbury from 1995 to 1999. He joined UTIAS as faculty in 1999, and from 2008 to 2013, he was Vice-Dean, Graduate Studies, for the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering. Appointed Director of UTIAS in 2016, he has led the institute in maintaining its status as Canada's premier aerospace graduate program.

Damaren's academic interests center on spacecraft dynamics and control, including nonlinear control design for spacecraft, magnetic attitude control, formation flying spacecraft control, robust control for flexible structures, and control systems for solar sails. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Aeronautics and Space Institute (CASI) and an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). His influential publications include "Hybrid Nonlinear Passivity-based Control Approach to Magnetic-Impulsive Spacecraft Attitude Regulation" with E. Sharifi (AIAA Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, accepted 2024), "Saturated Adaptive Pose Tracking Control of Spacecraft on SE(3) Under Attitude and Obstacle-Avoidance Constraints" with Z. Kang et al. (Automatica, 2024), "Equinoctial Lyapunov Control Law for Low-Thrust Rendezvous" with S. Narayanaswamy (AIAA Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, 2023), and "Passivity-based Control Design Frameworks for Hybrid Nonlinear Time-varying Dynamical Systems" with E. Sharifi (International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control, 2023). Under his leadership, UTIAS continues to foster interdisciplinary research collaborations and industry partnerships.