Michael Athans (born Michael Athanassiades in Drama, Greece, May 3, 1937 - May 26, 2020) was a Greek-American control theorist and a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a Fellow of the IEEE (1973) and a Fellow of the AAAS (1977). He was the recipient of numerous awards for his contributions in the field of control theory. A pioneer in the field of control theory, he helped shape modern control theory and spearheaded the field of multivariable control system design and the field of robust control. Athans was a member of the technical staff at Lincoln Laboratory from 1961 to 1964, and a Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty member from 1964 to 1998. Upon retirement, Athans moved to Lisbon, Portugal, where he was an Invited Research Professor in the Institute for Systems and Robotics, Instituto Superior Técnico where he received a honoris causa doctorate from the Universidade Técnica de Lisboa in 2011.
Education
Athans received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1958, 1959, and 1961, respectively.
Academic career
From 1961 to 1964, Athans was employed as a member of the technical staff at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, Mass. where he conducted research in optimal control and estimation theory. From 1964, until his early retirement in 1998, he was a faculty member in the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department, where he held the rank of Professor. He also was the director of the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) from 1974 to 1981. In 1978 he co-founded ALPHATECH Inc., Burlington, Mass., where he served as Chairman of the Board of Directors. He has also consulted for numerous other industrial organizations and government panels. In 1995 he was Visiting Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. From 1997 to 2011 he was an Invited Research Professor in the Institute for Systems and Robotics, Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal.
Athans is the co-author of Optimal Control (McGraw Hill, 1966), Systems, Networks and Computation: Basic Concepts (McGraw Hill, 1972) and Systems, Networks and Computation: Multivariable Methods (McGraw Hill, 1974). In 1974 he developed 65 color TV lectures and study guides on Modern Control Theory. In addition he authored or co-authored over 350 technical papers and reports. His research interests and contributions span the areas of optimum system and estimation theory, robust and adaptive multivariable control systems, and the application of these methodologies to defense, large space structures, IVHS transportation systems, aerospace, marine, automotive, power, manufacturing, economic, and military C3 systems. His last research interests focused on dynamic models of the human immune system and robust adaptive control methodologies.