Henry Samueli School of Engineering Dean

Dear colleagues,

On behalf of Chancellor Gillman, it is my privilege to announce the appointment of Magnus Egerstedt as dean of UCI’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering, effective July 19, 2021.

Professor Egerstedt has served as a professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering since 2001 and as the Steve W. Chaddick School Chair since 2018. He has held a range of academic leadership roles, including executive director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines. He also co-directed the campuswide Georgia Tech Diversity and Inclusion Fellows Program and held secondary appointments in mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering and interactive computing.

As the school chair, he focused on recruiting the best, most diverse students, faculty and staff; fostering a collaborative and inclusive work environment; and partnering with a range of stakeholders across campus to enable and promote high-impact, multidisciplinary research and scholarship. Major accomplishments during his tenure include establishing a 15,000-square-foot maker space dedicated to electronics, embedded processors and analog devices, as well as a remotely accessible robotics lab used by over a thousand research labs worldwide. He also supported fundraising efforts for endowed chairs, junior professorships targeting diverse new faculty, graduate fellowships and student-led initiatives.

An expert in the areas of control theory and robotics whose research emphasis is the control and coordination of multi-robot systems, Professor Egerstedt holds a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He is a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and a fellow of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the International Federation of Automatic Control.

He has received a number of teaching and research awards, including the John R. Ragazzini Education Award from the American Automatic Control Council, the O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award from the American Control Conference, the Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Advisor Award and the HKN Outstanding Teacher Award from Georgia Tech, and the Alumnus of the Year award from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

I am grateful to the search committee and its chair, Faryar Jabbari, senior associate dean of academic affairs and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, for their dedicated contributions to this nationwide search. In addition, I would like to extend my appreciation to Michael Green for his service as interim dean. His leadership over this past year has been exceptional under challenging circumstances and exemplifies his commitment to the engineering community and the campus.

We look forward to Professor Egerstedt joining the Anteater family. Please join me in welcoming him to UCI.

Sincerely,

Hal S. Stern, Ph.D.
Interim Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor
Chancellor’s Professor, Department of Statistics