Sam Coogan received the 2020 Donald P. Eckman Award at the American Control Conference, which was held July 1-3 in an online format. Coogan is the Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. 

The Eckman Award recognizes an outstanding young engineer in the field of automatic control. The recipient must be younger than 35 years on January 1 of the year of award. Contributions may be technical or scientific publications, theses, patents, inventions, or combinations of these items in the field of automatic control made while the nominee was a resident of the USA.

Coogan’s research is in the area of dynamical systems and autonomy and focuses on developing fundamental theory for verification and control of networked and autonomous systems with an emphasis on applications in transportation systems. His recent work has, for example, studied ride-sharing fleets with a mix of autonomous and human-driven vehicles, efficient charging of electric vehicles at shared charging facilities, and algorithms for safe coordination and control of multi-vehicle teams. His work has been supported by a Young Investigator Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research in 2018 and a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2018.