UTIAS Industry-Alumni-Student Dinner

Speaker Details

EngSci Alumnus Jonathan P. How
Richard C. Maclaurin Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Jonathan P. How is the Richard C. Maclaurin Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He received a B.A.Sc. (Aerospace) from the University of Toronto in 1987, and his S.M. and Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT in 1990 and 1993, respectively, and then studied for 1.5 years at MIT as a postdoctoral associate. Prior to joining MIT in 2000, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University.

Dr. How was the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Control Systems Magazine (‘15-‘19), an associate editor for the AIAA Journal of Aerospace Information Systems (‘12-‘21) and IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (‘18-‘21).  He was the Program Vice-chair (tutorials) for the 2021 Conference on Decision and Control and is the Program Chair for the American Control Conference in 2025.  He was a member of the IEEE CSS Board of Governors (‘20-’22), is a member of the IEEE CSS Executive Committee (VP Finance) (‘23-‘25),  is on the IEEE CSS Long Range Planning Committee (2022 – ), is a member of the IEEE CSS Technical Committee on Aerospace Control and the Technical Committee on Intelligent Control, was a member of the IEEE Fellows Selection committee for CSS (‘21-‘22), and since 2021, he serves as the AIAA Director on the American Automatic Control Council. He was a member of the USAF Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) from 2014 to 2017.

His research focuses on robust planning and learning under uncertainty with an emphasis on multiagent systems, and he was the planning and control lead for the MIT DARPA Urban Challenge team.  His work has been recognized with multiple awards, including receiving the IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award for 2022 and 2024, being inducted into the University of Toronto Engineering Hall of Distinction (2022), receiving the 2020 IEEE CSS Distinguished Member Award, the 2020 AIAA Intelligent Systems Award, the 2015 AeroLion Technologies Outstanding Paper Award for Unmanned Systems, the 2015 IEEE CSS Video Clip Contest, the 2011 IFAC Automatica award for best applications paper, and the 2002 Institute of Navigation Burka Award. He also received the Air Force Commander's Public Service Award in 2017. He is a Fellow of IEEE (2018) and AIAA (2016) and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2021.