July 29, 2011 — Zongli Lin, professor of electrical and computer engineering in the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science, was recently elected as a fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control. He was named a fellow for his "fundamental contributions to the analysis and design of control systems in the presence of actuator saturation."

The IFAC Fellow Award is given to those who have made outstanding and extraordinary contributions in the field of interest of IFAC, in the role as an engineer/scientist, technical leader, or educator. IFAC, founded in 1957, is a multinational federation of National Member Organizations, each one representing the engineering and scientific societies concerned with automatic control in its own country.

Lin's research interest lies in automatic control theory and their applications to practical systems. Automatic control theory is a field at the foundation of everything from heating and cooling systems to unmanned aircraft, with a variety of real-world applications. His research topics have included nonlinear control theory, control systems with actuator saturation, flight controls, modeling and control of magnetic bearing systems such as high-speed energy storage flywheels and artificial heart pumps.

Since July 1997, he has been a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Before that he was an assistant professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Zongli Lin received his B.S. degree in mathematics and computer science from Xiamen University in China in 1983; a master of engineering degree in automatic control from the Chinese Academy of Space Technology in Beijing in 1989; and a Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Washington State University in 1994. From July 1983 to July 1986, Lin worked as a control engineer at the Chinese Academy of Space Technology.