Two CoE faculty members were recently named to endowed chairs within their respective schools. Magnus Egerstedt, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), was appointed as the Julian T. Hightower Chair Professor in Systems and Controls, and Pat Mokhtarian was appointed to the inaugural Susan G. and Christopher D. Pappas Professorhip in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE).

Egerstedt joined the ECE faculty in 2001 and held the Schlumberger Professorship since 2013. He conducts research in the areas of control theory and robotics, with particular focus on control and coordination of complex networks, such as multi-robot systems, mobile sensor networks, and cyber-physical systems. Egerstedt was recently named as the executive director for Tech’s Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines and had previously served as ECE’s associate chair for research and external affairs since 2014. He leads the Georgia Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory, where he currently advises 11 graduate students, and he has published four books and over 300 refereed journal and conference publications. Egerstedt is not only an established educational leader in ECE and in the systems and controls group, but also on campus and in the massive open online course (MOOC) arena. He was instrumental in establishing the multidisciplinary Ph.D. program in robotics and was one of the first faculty members at Georgia Tech to teach a Coursera MOOC called "Control of Mobile Robots," which has enrolled over 100,000 students since it was first offered. In 2015, Egerstedt received several awards for his achievements in education, including the John R. Ragazzini Education Award from the American Automatic Control Council and two awards at the Georgia Tech Faculty Staff Honors Luncheon–the Professional Education Award and the Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis Advisor Award.  

Mokhtarian joined CEE in Fall 2013 semester from University of California-Davis, where she was a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, associate director of the Institute of Transportation Studies, and founding chair of the interdisciplinary MS/PhD program in Transportation Technology and Policy. Prior to joining the UC Davis faculty in 1990, she worked for several years in regional planning and consulting in Southern California.  Mokhtarian has specialized in the study of travel behavior for more than 30 years, and has authored or co-authored more than 200 refereed journal articles, technical reports, and other publications.  She is a North American area editor of the journal Transportation, and is on the editorial boards of Transportation Research Part A, Transport Policy, Transportation Letters, the International Journal of Sustainable Transportation, the European Journal of Transport and Infrastructure Research, and Travel Behavior and Society.  She is among the most highly cited faculty in the general area of transportation engineering.