Fumin Zhang has been appointed as the director of the Decision and Control Laboratory (DCL), effective May 11, 2020. 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.  

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. 

DCL regularly hosts seminars given by faculty and students at Georgia Tech and by researchers from other universities and from the corporate world. In addition, DCL hosts a symposium each spring that showcases the research of its students.  The previous directors include Jeff Shamma, Magnus Egerstedt, Eric Feron, and Sam Coogan & Matthieu Bloch (who served jointly in the position).

Zhang’s research focuses on mobile sensor networks that demonstrate bio-inspired long duration autonomy. He has contributed to the co-design of control, sensing, and communication algorithms for mobile sensing agents that collect information to model spatial temporal stochastic fields. An application domain of his research has been marine robots for environmental sensing and data collection. 

Zhang has also established a theoretical framework for the investigation of battery-supported Cyber-Physical Systems. This framework involves the development of a co-design methodology for real-time scheduling, real-time control, and battery management.