Magnus Egerstedt has been appointed as the Julian T. Hightower Chair Professor in Systems and Controls in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), effective August 1. This professorship was previously held by Jeff Shamma, who has left Georgia Tech for a position at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.

Egerstedt joined the ECE faculty in 2001 and held the Schlumberger Professorship since 2013. He conducts research in the areas of control theory and robotics, with particular focus on control and coordination of complex networks, such as multi-robot systems, mobile sensor networks, and cyber-physical systems.

Egerstedt was recently named as the executive director for Tech’s Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines and had previously served as ECE’s associate chair for research and external affairs since 2014. He leads the Georgia Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory, where he currently advises 11 graduate students, and he has published four books and over 300 refereed journal and conference publications.

Egerstedt is not only an established educational leader in ECE and in the systems and controls group, but also on campus and in the massive open online course (MOOC) arena. He was instrumental in establishing the multidisciplinary Ph.D. program in robotics and was one of the first faculty members at Georgia Tech to teach a Coursera MOOC called "Control of Mobile Robots," which has enrolled over 100,000 students since it was first offered. In 2015, Egerstedt received several awards for his achievements in education, including the John R. Ragazzini Education Award from the American Automatic Control Council and two awards at the Georgia Tech Faculty Staff Honors Luncheon–the Professional Education Award and the Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis Advisor Award.  

Elected as an IEEE Fellow in 2012, Egerstedt is an IEEE Control Systems Society Distinguished Lecturer. He is also a past recipient of the Alumnus of the Year Award from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, the NSF CAREER Award, and the W. Marshall Leach/Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Teacher Award, which is determined by a majority vote of the ECE senior class.