Yongxin Chen Receives 2022 Eckman Award from the American Automatic Control Council

Yongxin Chen received the 2022 Donald P. Eckman Award at the American Control Conference Awards Ceremony, which was held Thursday, July 9^th in Atlanta, Georgia. Chen is Assistant Professor in the School of Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The Eckman Award recognizes an outstanding young engineer in the field of automatic control. The recipient must be younger than 35 years on January 1 of the year of award. Contributions may be technical or scientific publications, theses, patents, inventions, or combinations of these items in the field of automatic control made while the nominee was a resident of the USA.

Chen received his B.S. in mechanical engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, in 2011, and a Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering, under the supervision of Tryphon Georgiou, from University of Minnesota in 2016. Before joining Georgia Tech, he had a one-year research fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center from August 2016 to August 2017 and was an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University from August 2017 to August 2018. Chen is the past recipient of the George S. Axelby Best Paper Award (IEEE Transaction on Automatic Control | 2017) for his joint work ‘‘Optimal steering of a linear stochastic system to a final probability distribution, Part I’’ with Tryphon Georgiou and Michele Pavon. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2020, the Simons-Berkeley research fellowship in 2021, and the A.V. ‘Bal’ Balakrishnan Award in 2021.

Chen’s prior work involved stochastic control, optimal transport, and optimization. His current research focuses on the intersection between control, machine learning, and robotics with the goal to develop theoretical foundations and algorithms for robots so that they can accomplish complex tasks autonomously and reliably.