University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The Grainger College of Engineering

Jose Bejar Cruz, Jr.

[title]
To Jose Bejar Cruz for outstanding contributions to the field of automatic control in research, teaching, and service.

Howard D. Winbigler Chair in Engineering, Department of Electrical Engineering, The Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio

  • BS, 1953, Electrical Engineering, University of the Philippines
  • MS, 1956, Electrical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • PhD, 1959, Electrical Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

 Jose B. Cruz has compiled an enviable record of accomplishments in engineering research and education. During his 27 years on the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois, he was one of the original founders of the Allerton Conference on Circuits, Systems, and Computers, served as associate director of the Coordinated Science Lab, and as associate head of the department. He was chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Irvine, from 1986 to 1990 and then served as dean of engineering at The Ohio State University. He retired from the deanship in 1997 and was awarded the first Winbigler Chair in Engineering.

In research, he has made major contributions to the theory and practice of automatic control. His work in the 1970s and 1980s on the control of leader-follower systems is still considered one of the major contributions of the half-century in the theory of hierarchical control systems. Still active in research, he leads a major research effort by a consortium of four universities and one company, funded by DARPA, to apply his work on the leader-follower control problem to the design of optimum strategies for human-automaton resource entity deployment with potential applications in future combat systems. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1980 and is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and AAAS. One of his strongest assets is his ability to work with people, and he has used it effectively to benefit the engineering profession.

Current as of 2003.