Coogan will work closely with the ECE Graduate Affairs Office and the School’s Graduate Student Recruitment Committee to attract top Ph.D. applicants.
Samuel Coogan will serve as the faculty coordinator for graduate recruitment in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). Coogan, an associate professor, is succeeding Professor Mark Davenport in the position, who was recently named the associate chair for Graduate Affairs in ECE.
The faculty coordinator for graduate recruitment role was established in 2018 to work closely with the ECE Graduate Affairs Office and the School’s Graduate Student Recruitment Committee to better recruit and attract top Ph.D. applicants.
“I am excited to continue our School's legacy of attracting and educating top-notch Ph.D. students from across the US and the globe,” Coogan said. “The growing number of applicants to our programs, including an expanding list of interdisciplinary opportunities, highlights the strong demand for a Georgia Tech ECE graduate education. I look forward to collaborating with colleagues across ECE to build on this momentum and to recruit the next generation of engineering leaders."
Coogan joined ECE in 2017 as an assistant professor, became the Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professor in 2018, and was promoted to associate professor in 2022. Prior to that, he was an assistant professor at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from 2015 to 2017.
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His research is in the area of control theory and robotics and focuses on developing scalable tools for autonomous control of robotic and other cyber-physical systems.
Since coming to Georgia Tech, Coogan has been highly involved in activities focused on graduate recruitment and graduate mentorship. He has been a member of the ECE Graduate Student Recruitment Committee since 2018 and has been the ECE representative to the Robotics Ph.D. Program Committee since 2023. He co-created and co-organized a new annual regional Southeast Controls Conference that was inaugurally hosted at Georgia Tech in 2019, and he was the faculty organizer of a student-led, institute-wide Decision and Control Lab Student Symposium in 2024. He also serves as an ECE representative to the Faculty Senate.
He is the recipient of several awards, including the 2020 Donald P. Eckman award that recognizes “an outstanding young engineer in the field of automatic control”, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Young Investigator Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award in 2022, the ECE Outstanding Junior Faculty Award in 2022, and the IEEE Transactions on Control of Networked Systems Outstanding Paper Award in 2018.
Coogan, a Georgia Tech alum, earned his B.S. in electrical engineering in 2010. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from University of California, Berkeley in 2012 and 2015, respectively.
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