André Tits

Title: Professor
Areas/Affiliations: ECE, ISR
E-mail: andre@umd.edu
Phone: (301)405-3669
Office: 2271 A.V. Williams
Website: http://www.ece.umd.edu/~andre/

Biography:

André L. Tits was born in Verviers, Belgium on April 13, 1951. He received the `Ingénieur Civil' degree from the University of Liège, Belgium and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, all in Electrical Engineering, in 1974, 1979, and 1980, respectively.

Since 1981, Dr. Tits has been with the University of Maryland, College Park. Currently, he is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and he holds a permanent joint appointment with the Institute for Systems Research. He was awarded the Clark School of Engineering Faculty Service Award in 2000. He has held visiting positions at the University of California, Berkeley, at the Lund Institute of Technology, at INRIA, at the Catholic University of Louvain at Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium and at the Australian National University.

Dr. Tits received a 1985 NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and a member of the Mathematical Programming Society and of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

From July 1998 to April 2005, Dr. Tits was the Editor for Technical Notes and Correspondence of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. Since September 2005, he has been the Editor for Rapid Publications of Automatica.

Research Interests:

Dr. Tits' main research interests lie in various aspects of numerical optimization, optimization-based system design and robust control with emphasis on numerical methods. In addition to carrying out fundamental research work in these areas, researchers in Dr. Tits' group have developed several software packages. Especially popular is FSQP, a tandem of sophisticated software suites for nonlinear constrainted optimization, in use at over 1000 sites around the world.