Tamer Başar - Biography#

Tamer Başar received B.S.E.E. from Robert College, Istanbul in 1969, and M.S., M.Phil, and Ph.D. degrees in engineering and applied science from Yale University in 1970, 1971 and 1972, respectively.. After holding positions at Harvard University, Marmara Research Institute (Gebze, Turkey), and Boğaziçi University (Istanbul), he joined the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1981, where he held the highest titled position of Swanlund Endowed Chair from 2007 until 2020, at which point he reached emeritus status. He currently holds the positions of Swanlund Endowed Chair Emeritus; Center for Advanced Study (CAS) Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering; and Research Professor, Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) and Information Trust Institute (ITI). At Illinois, he has also served as Director of CAS (2014 - 2020), Interim Dean of Engineering (2018), and Interim Director of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology (2008 - 2010).

He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and Fellow of IEEE, IFAC, SIAM, and AAAI. He has served as President of the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS; 2000), Founding President of the International Society of Dynamic Games (ISDG; 1990-1994), and President of the American Automatic Control Council (AACC; 2010-2011). He has received several high-level awards and recognitions over the years, including the IEEE CSS Bode Lecture Prize (2004), IFAC’s Quazza Medal (2005), AACC’s Bellman Control Heritage Award (2006), ISDG’s Isaacs Award (2010), the IEEE Control Systems Technical Field Award (2014), Medal of Science of Turkey (1993), IEEE Millennium Medal (2000), and Yale University’s Wilbur Cross Medal (2021). He has also received honorary doctorates from several international institutions, including (in Europe) KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm; 2019), and Boğaziçi (2012) and Doğuş (2007) Universities (Istanbul). He served as Editor-in-Chief of Automatica (2004-2014), has founded several conferences and book series over the years, and is currently editor of several book series. He has contributed profusely to the fields of systems, control, communications, optimization, computing, networks, and dynamic games, and is ranked by ScholarGPS as sixth in the world in terms of lifetime contributions to Game Theory. Throughout his career he has maintained strong ties with several European institutions and researchers, leading to joint publications with 4-digit citations, having also spent 3 sabbatical years in Europe, at Twente University of Technology (the Netherlands; 1978-79), and INRIA (France; 1987 - 1988, 1994 - 1995).