Viterbi Faculty Directory

Biography

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Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, 1982, U of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, IL..

Petros A. Ioannou received the B.Sc. degree with First Class Honors from University College, London, England, in 1978 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois, in 1980 and 1982, respectively. During the period 1975-1978, he held a Commonwealth Scholarship from the Association of Commonwealth Universities, London, England. He was awarded several prizes, including the Goldsmid Prize and the A. P. Head Prize from University College, London. From 1979 to 1982 he was a research assistant at the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois. In 1982, Dr. Ioannou joined the Department of Electrical Engineering-Systems, University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, California. He is currently University Professor and holds the A.V. ‘Bal’ Balakrishnan Chair Professor in the same Department. He is the Director of the Center of Advanced Transportation Technologies an organized research unit at USC . He also holds courtesy appointments with the Departments of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and Industrial System Engineering. He is the Associate Director for Research for the University Transportation Center METRANS at the University of Southern California. He is the founder and Director of the Master Degree program on Financial Engineering at USC. He was visiting Professor at the University of Newcastle, Australia and the Australian National University in Canberra during parts of Fall of 1988, the Technical University of Crete in summer of 1992 and Fall of 2001 and served as the first Dean of the School of Pure and Applied Science at the University of Cyprus (UCY) in 1995 while on leave from the University of Southern California. As a Dean he pioneered the establishment of the School of Engineering at UCY. In 2008/2009 he was a faculty member at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies of the Cyprus University of Technology while on sabbatical leave from the University of Southern California where he helped established the educational curriculum of the Department.

Dr. Ioannou was the recipient of the Axelby Best Paper Award by the IEEE Control System Society in 1984 and the recipient of a 1985 Presidential Young Investigator Award for his research in Adaptive Control. In 2009 he received the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE) Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) Society (ITSS) Outstanding ITS Application Award and the 2009 IET Heaviside Medal for Achievement in Control by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (former IEE) in UK. In 2012 he received the IEEE ITSS Outstanding ITS Research Award. In 2016 he received the IEEE Transportation Technologies Field Award (highest level in IEEE), the Senior Research Award from the Viterbi School of Engineering and the Transition to Practice Award from the IEEE Control System Society. In 2019 he received the User-Inspired Research Award in recognition and Appreciation of Excellence from the Viterbi School of Engineering. In 2022 he was inducted to the National Academy of Engineering and to the National Academy of Inventors and became Foreign member of the Academy Europaea. In 2023 he became Foreign Member of the European Academy of Sciences. In 2024 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award of the IEEE ITS Society, he was designated as University Professor, highest recognition given by the University of Southern California and was awarded the ASME Rufus Oldenburger Medal and became Fellow of Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association

He is currently the President Elect of the IEEE ITS Society. Prior to that he was Vice President (VP) for Membership, VP for Publications and served as Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. He has been an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, the International Journal of Control, Automatica and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. He served as a Member of the Control System society on IEEE ITS Council Committee and his center on advanced transportation technologies was a founding member of ITS America. He also served as Associate Editor at Large of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and Chairman of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) Technical Committee on Transportation Systems. He served as a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE ITS Society for over a decade. He is one of the founders of the Mediterranean Control Association and a member of the Board of Governors and one of the founders of the IEEE Mediterranean Control Conference, which has been taking place annually since 1992. He is a co-founder of the University Transportation Center, METRANS, at the University of Southern California and California State University Long Beach.
Dr. Ioannou is a Lifetime Fellow of IEEE, Fellow of International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), and Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the author/co-author of 9 books and over 400 research publications in the area of controls, vehicle dynamics, neural networks, nonlinear dynamical systems, intelligent transportation systems and Financial Engineering. He founded SSC Systems Inc in the US in the early 90’s and TranSim Inc in Cyprus which operated as research consulting companies in the area of transportation and autonomous vehicles for a decade.
In his spare time a he serves as a technical consultant to several automotive, aerospace and computer/electronics companies and as expert witness on robotics, automotive control and sensor systems, safety and human factors, vehicle accident analysis, collision avoidance systems, vehicle technologies as well as patent infringement cases.