With this award, Dr. Zhang will establish a theoretical foundation for battery supported cyber-physical systems. These systems play vital roles in real-time controlled applications across multiple disciplines such as sensor networks, robotics, and transportation systems, where limited computing resources and energy budgets pose major constraints. This effort will advance control theory to understand and adjust the behaviors of control tasks supported by embedded computing devices and batteries.

An ECE faculty member since 2007, Dr. Zhang was previously a lecturer and postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. He earned his Ph.D. in ECE from the University of Maryland at College Park, where he also worked for the Institute for Systems Research. His B.S. and M.S. degrees, both in electrical engineering, are from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.