Fumin Zhang has been appointed to the Dean’s Professorship, effective April 1, 2022. This professorship resides in the College of Engineering Dean’s Office at Georgia Tech.

Zhang has been a faculty member in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) since 2007, where he is currently a full professor. During his employment at Tech, he has received 29 external funding grants with the total funding level exceeding $8 million. He has published two edited books, 60 journal articles, 15 computer science conference papers, seven book chapters, and 110 electrical engineering and robotics conference papers. He has filed two utility patents and four additional provisional patents. He has given nine keynote or plenary speeches. Zhang has graduated 14 students with Ph.D. degrees, with 5 students taken tenure-track positions.

He is recognized as a leading expert worldwide in autonomy of underwater gliders — one type of long endurance marine robots that have been used intensively as an innovative mobile sensing platform for ocean observation. His work in distributed active perception received interests and recognition from a broad range of disciplines including control, robotics, communication, and ocean engineering. His work has been applied to underwater gliders collecting data in challenging ocean environments since 2007. The work is also applied to an environmental survey for the aftermath of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill performed by a fleet of marine robots in 2012. He received prestigious awards such as the NSF CAREER awards and the ONR YIP Award for his work.

His research topics address challenging problems in marine autonomy, aerial robotics, mobile sensor networks, and foundations of cyber-physical systems. He aspires to develop long term autonomy solutions for swarms of marine robots, aerial vehicles, and satellites to form mobile sensor networks to collect information from land and ocean. He is especially interested in sustainability related topics such as coastal environment protection, extreme weather forecast, smart aquaculture, search and rescue, and security of seaports.

Zhang is also a distinguished scholar, holding leadership positions in the IEEE control systems society, the IEEE robotics and automation society, and the IEEE ocean engineering society. In May 2020, he was appointed the director of the Decision and Control Laboratory (DCL). The DCL is an interdepartmental laboratory at Georgia Tech whose mission facilitates and fosters collaboration and scholarly exchange among Georgia Tech faculty members who are interested in the field of decision and control systems. Research of DCL faculty involves analytical, computational, and experimental activities that span a variety of engineering technologies, including areas such as air traffic control, molecular processes, mobile robotics, and medical imaging.