Mark W. Spong

Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Room 149 Coordinated Science Laboratory 1308 West Main Street Urbana, Illinois 61801 Telephone: (217) -333-4281 e-mail: mspong"at"uiuc.edu Fax: 217-244-5705

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Mark W. Spong is Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Research Professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received the B.A. degree, magna cum laude, in mathematics and physics from Hiram College, Hiram, Ohio in 1975, the M.S. degree in mathematics from New Mexico State University in 1977, and the M.S. and D.Sc. degrees in systems science and mathematics in 1979 and 1981, respectively, from Washington University in St. Louis.

He has been at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 1984. From 1981 to 1982 he was with the Department of Electrical Engineering at Lehigh University. From 1982 to 1984 he was with the School of Electrical Engineering at Cornell University. He has held visiting positions at the National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico, the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, the Laboratoire d'Automatique de Grenoble, France, The Lund Institute of Technology, Lund, Sweden, the Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, Belgium, The Universite d'Tecnologie de Compiegne, France, the National University of Singapore, and the Technical University of Munich, Germany.

Dr. Spong was the 2005 President of the IEEE Control Systems Society. He was Vice President for Publication Activities of the IEEE Control Systems Society from 2000-2002, Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology from 1997-2000, and a member of its Board of Governors from 1994-2002. His research interests are in nonlinear control theory and robotics. He has published over 200 technical articles in control and robotics and is co-author of four books, Robot Dynamics and Control, John Wiley & Sons, 1989, Robot Control: Dynamics, Motion Planning, and Analysis, IEEE Press, 1992, Robot Modeling and Control, John Wiley & Sons, 2005 and The Reaction Wheel Pendulum, Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2007.

Dr. Spong is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Distinguished Member of the IEEE Control Systems Society and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. His recent awards include the 2007 IROS Fumio Harashima Award for Innovative Technologies, the Senior Scientist Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Bonn, Germany, the IEEE Third Millennium Medal, and the O. Hugo Schuck Award and John R. Ragazzini Award from the American Automatic Control Council. In addition, he is President of Mechatronic Systems, Inc., a company he founded in 1996.