Murat Arcak

Murat Arcak is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and Professor of Mechanical Engineering in Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, holding the Robert M. Saunders Endowed Chair in the College of Engineering. He received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, in 1996, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1997 and 2000, respectively. Prior to joining UC Berkeley in 2008, he served on the faculty at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Arcak's research focuses on dynamical systems and control theory, including control theory, autonomous systems, multi-agent systems, cyber-physical systems, and networks, with applications in transportation, energy, synthetic biology, and biology. His group develops scalable control design and verification methods for large-scale complex systems featuring interconnected components, nonlinear dynamics, and learning and decision-making capabilities, leveraging compositional, hierarchical, and learning-based abstractions as well as structural system properties.

Arcak has earned numerous honors, including the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2003, Donald P. Eckman Award from the American Automatic Control Council in 2006, SIAM Activity Group on Control and Systems Theory Prize in 2007, IEEE Control Systems Society Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize in 2014, IEEE Fellow in 2012, IFAC Fellow in 2020, IFAC Automatica Paper Prize in 2020, CSS Transactions on Control of Network Systems Outstanding Paper Award in 2017, Brockett-Willems Outstanding Paper Award in 2021, and Electrical Engineering Award for Outstanding Teaching in 2014. He co-authored influential books such as Networks of Dissipative Systems: Compositional Certification of Stability, Performance, and Safety (Springer, 2016) and Interval Reachability Analysis: Bounding Trajectories of Uncertain Systems with Boxes for Control and Verification (Springer, 2021). Key publications include "Data-Driven Reachability and Support Estimation With Christoffel Functions" (IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 2023), "A blueprint for a synthetic genetic feedback optimizer" (Nature Communications, 2023), "Cell-in-the-loop pattern formation with optogenetically emulated cell-to-cell signaling" (Nature Communications, 2020), "Symmetry reduction for dynamic programming" (Automatica, 2018), and earlier highly cited works like "Constructive nonlinear control: a historical perspective" (Automatica, 2001) and "Passivity as a design tool for group coordination" (2006). His work has profoundly influenced control systems engineering through innovative approaches to stability, performance, and safety certification.