Brian D.O. Anderson

Biography

As a professor, author, and educational innovator, Dr. Brian D.O. Anderson has been a driving force in electrical engineering education for over thirty years.

Chair of the department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Newcastle, Australia, from 1967 to 1982, Dr. Anderson worked to establish internationally prominent bachelor, master, and doctoral programs. In 1982, Dr. Anderson joined the Australian National University, where he established a highly regarded Department of Systems Engineering, the first engineering department of the University. Subsequently, he went on to establish a multi-department Research School of Information Science and Engineering.

Dr. Anderson’s colleagues laud him as an inspired, motivating teacher. He has taught at every level, from freshman to doctoral, and a number of his many Ph.D. students and post-doctoral fellows have gone on to become IEEE Fellows and Fellows of the Australian Academy of Technological Services and Engineering. His eight books, including Linear Optimal Control and Optimal Control: Linear Quadratic Methods, co-authored with J.B. Moore, have been widely adopted.

In the realm of educational policy, Dr. Anderson has served on the Australian Science and Technology Council and the Prime Minister’s Science and Engineering Council, among others, where he has worked to enhance electrical engineering education in Australia. He is currently President of the Australian Academy of Science, and from 1990 to 1993, he was President of the International Federation of Automatic Control.

Brian D.O. Anderson was born 15 January 1941, in Sydney, Australia. He received a B.Sc. degree in mathematics from Sydney University in 1962, and a B.E. in Electrical Engineering in 1964, also from Sydney University. He received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1966. Currently, Dr. Anderson is Director of the Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering at the Australian National University.

Dr. Anderson became an IEEE Fellow and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1975, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering in 1980, and a Fellow of the Royal Society (London) in 1989. He has received many awards, including the Senior Award of the IEEE Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Society, the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Guillemin-Cauer Prize and the IEEE Control Systems Society Bode Lecture Prize, and the IEEE Control Systems Award. He holds honorary doctorates from the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and the Universities of Melbourne and Sydney.