Lucy Pao

  • Professor

Lucy Y. Pao is the Palmer Endowed Chair Professor in the Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering Department at the University of Colorado Boulder. She has completed sabbaticals at Harvard University (2001-2002), the University of California, Berkeley (2008), the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (2009), the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study in Delmenhorst, Germany (2016-2017) and the ForWind Center for Wind Energy Research at Oldenburg University (2016-2017). She earned BS, MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University. Her research has primarily focused on engineering control systems, with applications ranging from rapid and precise control of atomic force microscopes to multi-megawatt wind energy systems. She is a fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Earlier awards include an IFAC Young Author Prize, a National Science Foundation Early Faculty CAREER Award, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, and a World Haptics Conference Best Paper Award. Selected recent awards include the 2012 IEEE Control Systems Magazine Outstanding Paper Award, the 2015 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Journal on Control and Optimization Best Paper Prize, the 2017 Control Engineering Practice Award from the American Automatic Control Council, and the Scientific Award 2017 from the European Academy of Wind Energy. Selected recent and current professional society activities include being a fellow of the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (2009-present), general chair of the 2013 American Control Conference, member of the IEEE Control Systems Society Board of Governors (2011-2013 and 2015), IEEE CSS Fellow Nominations Chair (2016-2019) and member of the IFAC Executive Board (2017-2020).

Core Areas:  Combined Feedfoward and Feedback Control, Control of Flexible Structures

Applications:  Wind Turbines, Wind Farms, Atomic Force Microscopes, Tape Drives