Mathematics professor named fellow of IFAC

LAWRENCE — Bozenna Pasik-Duncan, professor of mathematics and courtesy professor of electrical engineering and computer science, has been elected a Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control.  The IFAC Fellow award is given to persons who have made outstanding and extraordinary contributions in the field of interest of IFAC. The certificate and pin will be awarded at the 2014 IFAC World Congress in Cape Town, South Africa.

Pasik-Duncan is recognized for her “important contributions to stochastic adaptive control, inspiring vision of control as a field that spans science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and for her commitment to control education.” She has organized workshops across the U.S. and Europe for the past 13 years to increase the general awareness of the importance of systems and control technology and its cross-disciplinary nature among high school teachers and students.  She was the founder of the Women in Control Group and the first chair of the Standing Committee on Women in Control.

Pasik-Duncan has received other notable awards: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow; IEEE Third Millennium Medal; Distinguished Member of the Control Systems Society; University of Kansas Women’s Hall of Fame; NSF Career Advancement Award; 1975 Polish Ministry of Higher Education and Science award; 1982 IREX Fellowship for research in the US; 1996 Kemper Fellowship for excellence in teaching and outreach; 2002 University of Kansas HOPE (Honor to Outstanding Progressive Educator) award; 2011 Service to Kansas Award.

Pasik-Duncan completed her master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Warsaw and her doctorate and Doctor of Science degrees from the Warsaw School of Economics in Poland. She came to KU in 1984 after she was a faculty member of the Department of Mathematics at Warsaw School of Economics.  She has conducted research supported by grants from organizations including the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Air Force and the Army.

IFAC, founded in September 1957, is a multinational federation of National Member Organizations (NMOs), each one representing the engineering and scientific societies concerned with automatic control in its own country. The aims of the Federation are to promote the science and technology of control in the broadest sense in all systems, whether, for example, engineering, physical, biological, social or economic, in both theory and application.