When A.V. Balakrishnan, MSEE ’50, Ph.D. Mathematics ’54, came to the United States in 1947, he wanted to become a Hollywood sound engineer.  The film industry was at its peak, nearly a decade after the rise of sound film production, and was releasing profitable wartime favorites one after another.  But Hollywood was closed to anyone who wasn’t a member of the guild.    

 

“It was nearly impossible to get a job, so I switched to electrical engineering because it was very close to sound engineering,” says Balakrishnan, who earned his first USC masters degree in cinema in 1949. Then he turned to electrical engineering, hooked up with USC Professor R. Meigs and got a job as a laboratory assistant, earning about $200 a month.  It paid the bills, and in 1950, he had earned a second masters degree, this time in electrical engineering. Last April, Balakrishnan was received the USC Viterbi School’s Distinguished Alumni Award in Academia.

 

“I would have gone into a Ph.D. program in electrical engineering from there, but USC didn’t have one, so I enrolled in a doctoral program in mathematics,” Balakrishnan says.  One of his professors, R. S. Phillips, an internationally acclaimed mathematician from MIT, recognized Balakrishnan’s mathematical abilities and encouraged him to stay in the field.

 

“Bal was so gifted in mathematics,” says his wife Sophia, a Russian-born linguist who works as an academic translator, “but like most theoreticians, he’s always creating and destroying his ideas.  He’ll come up with an equation to explain ‘air flutter’ at 50,000 feet, then tell me 30 minutes later why it won’t work.  Then he’s on to a new way of solving the problem.”

 

Balakrishnan considers himself an applied mathematician, interested in pure research for research’s sake.  A professor of mathematics and electrical engineering at UCLA, and director of the NASA-UCLA Flight Systems Research Center, he specializes in problems of aerodynamic stability and control.  Much of his theoretical work forms the basis of computer models, which are used to test the control of unmanned aircraft flying through turbulent conditions. 

 

He never imagined he would wind up in aerodynamics. Growing up in Chennai (Madras) on the southeast coast of India, he entered the University of Madras in the early 1940s and won a scholarship competition from the Indian government to study in the United States and learn to produce documentaries.

 

“The problem was that the job they had waiting for me at the Indian Institute of Science just didn’t measure up to the opportunities I knew I would have with a Ph.D. in the U.S.,” he says. “So I stayed.”

 

After earning his Ph.D. in 1954, he went to the East Coast and worked in radar at RCA for two years. “That was a hotbed of activity at the time, but I didn’t want to stay in Camden because it was known only for Campbell’s soup,” he laughs. “Instead, I joined the wagon going west, like so many other engineers did.”

 

He became a visiting assistant professor in USC’s mathematics department in 1956. A year later, he took a job at Space Technology Laboratories.  Then in 1961, his ship came in; he accepted a job as an associate professor of electrical engineering at UCLA.  One of the first people he hired was Andrew Viterbi, namesake of USC’s engineering school. 

 

“Andy was very good at spread spectrum loops for transmitting satellite signals, so we worked together,” he says.  “Until that time, most of the work in this field was concentrated on the East Coast, at MIT and Bell Labs.  Control theory was evolving into guidance and communications systems for spacecraft. We were the pioneers of that era on the West Coast.”

 

In 1965 he became a full professor of mathematics at UCLA and in 1969, he founded and became the first chairman of UCLA’s Department of System Science. In 1986, he became director of the NASA-UCLA Flight Systems Research Center.  While he was making a name for himself, Balakrishnan’s son, David, was doing the same in music.  A talented violinist, David attended The Juilliard School in New York City, then founded a jazz group, the Turtle Island String Quartet, which has won several Grammy nominations. “Usually when someone knows my name, they think it’s David, not me,” Balakrishnan quips. 

 

His four other children are just as accomplished.  Jerry is a professor of psychology at Purdue University; Sally is a computer scientist; Kenneth has a Ph.D. in linguistics from Yale University; and Robert works in the seafood industry in Los Angeles.

 

Balakrishnan pulls out a Christmas card with a picture of his two grandchildren on the front.  “They’re about as American as they come,” he jokes.  He doesn’t have much time to see them, not with his teaching, research and frequent trips to the NASA-Dryden Flight Research Center in Lancaster, Calif.  He and his colleagues at UCLA collaborate with the NASA center on research in computation fluid dynamics, which addresses problems of air flow, velocity, turbulence and wing flutter. The pressure is on to flight test dozens of next-generation aircraft coming online in every shape, size and weight imaginable.   

 

The defense industry, which allocated $2 billion this year to develop and buy more unmanned aircraft, takes a special interest in this testing.  Just recently, the Pentagon boldly announced its vision to replace a third of the nation’s military aircraft with pilotless planes by 2010.

 

So the testing goes on, but not without a disaster here or there. When that happens, Balakrishnan is usually one of the experts called upon to evaluate specific problems. He consulted with industry reps on some of the issues arising from the crash of a Helios prototype aircraft, a remotely piloted, propeller-driven winged aircraft that plunged into the Pacific Ocean in 2003 a few minutes after launch. The accident raised a lot of concern about flight safety and how aviation experts could make unmanned aircraft as safe to fly as piloted airplanes.   

 

Balakrishnan has been working with the NASA-Dryden test facility since the 1970s to develop flight test data reduction techniques and bring NASA and the research community into closer collaboration. In 1986, his efforts were rewarded when he received NASA’s Public Service Medal for his “exceptional continuous theoretical and administrative contributions in establishing the UCLA-NASA Flight Systems Research Center.”  In 2001, he received the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award -– the highest professional achievement award given to control systems engineers and scientists -- for his contributions to the theory and application of automatic control.