A renowned scholar at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) specialising in systems and control has been elected as Fellow of the prestigious International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC).

Professor Chen Jie, Chair Professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering at CityU, is one of only 13 people in the world elected as an IFAC Fellow in 2011, and the only one from Hong Kong.

“I am very honoured to be elected as a fellow of the IFAC. A recognition of my own research notwithstanding, it is more a recognition as a whole of the quality research we do at CityU,” said Professor Chen.

The fellowship, established in 2004, is given annually to a selected number of individuals who have made outstanding and extraordinary contributions to the field as an engineer/scientist, technical leader or educator. Professor Chen’s award recognises his “seminal contribution to the theory of performance limitations in feedback systems and robust identification and control”.

The field of systems and control is an enabling type of knowledge that seeks to engineer physical processes and the dynamics of physical entities using various electrical and mechanical devices available to betterment. For instance, thermostats control heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems by turning on the heating or cooling systems to bring a building to the set temperature.

In his research, Professor Chen works in different areas of systems and control, including robust control, system identification, time-delay systems, and the fundamentals of linear systems theory. His research has contributed to the creation of knowledge and discovery of human understanding in science and engineering, helping improve the standard of living for people around the world.

Other than his recent award of the IFAC fellow, Professor Chen is a fellow of IEEE and AAAS, and a Yangtze Scholar/Chair Professor of China. He was the recipient of the 1996 US National Science Foundation CAREER Award, 2004 SICE International Award, and 2006 Natural Science Foundation of China Outstanding Overseas Young Scholar Award. He has sat on a number of journal editorial boards, serving as an associate editor and a guest editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, guest editor for IEEE Control Systems Magazine, associate editor for Automatica, Journal of Control Theory and Applications, and the founding editor-in-chief for the Journal of Control Science and Engineering. He has published two books and over 160 international journal articles and conference papers.

Founded in 1957, IFAC is an international professional organisation consisting of 51 national member organisations, representing engineering and scientific societies concerned with automatic control of the member states.