The newest addition to the ITS core faculty is Alexandre Bayen, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, who teaches classes in Control and Optimization of Distributed Parameters Systems, Civil and Environmental Engineering Systems Analysis, and the Selected Topics in Air Transportation seminar. His research interests include modeling and control of distributed parameter systems with applications to transportation and distribution systems.

Bayen received an engineering degree in applied mathematics from the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, and early on was attracted to the mathematics of engineering in general and aeronautics in particular.

“French undergraduate programs have a very mathematically-oriented curriculum, and this definitely shaped my vision of engineering. Within aeronautics there are more or less qualitative and quantitative branches, and I think being in control and optimization, which is my specialty, within systems was just extending my taste for theoretical and mathematical work.”

Bayen left France for Stanford University where he received first a Master’s in 1999 and then in 2003 a PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics. While a PhD student, Bayen worked at NASA Ames where he developed a hybrid model of the aircraft network which incorporates controller action, as well as a set of polynomial algorithms for agent routing-sequencing within such a network. After his PhD, Bayen joined the Laboratoire de Recherches Balistiques et Aerodynamiques in Vernon, France. In this Department of Defense-operated facility, he worked in the Autonomous Navigation Laboratory, where he led a team of researchers working on UAVs (Autonomous Aerial Vehicles). He left the Department of Defense with the rank of Major to join the faculty at Berkeley.

At Stanford his thesis advisor was Claire Tomlin, an aeronautics scholar who recently received a MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ award. Tomlin received her PhD at Berkeley and worked on a NEXTOR project as a student. Her specialty is embedded software, and currently she has joint appointments at Berkeley and Stanford.