Necmiye Ozay receives 1938E Award from College of Engineering

Necmiye Ozay, assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, received the 1938E Award from the College of Engineering, which recognizes “an outstanding teacher in both elementary and advanced courses, an understanding counselor of students who seek guidance in their choice of a career, a contributor to the educational growth of his/her College, and a teacher whose scholarly integrity pervades his/her service and the profession of Engineering.”

When Prof. Ozay joined the University of Michigan in 2013, her expertise in hybrid dynamical systems broadened the University’s scope of research. Specifically, she focuses on control systems, dynamical systems, cyber-physical systems, identification, verification, and validation of systems and information extraction from sensory data with applications in autonomy. She has already made major contributions to correct-by-construction control synthesis for cyber-physical systems.

Prof. Ozay has taught the graduate course Linear Systems Theory and the course Control Systems Analysis and Design, an upper level undergraduate course also taken by graduate students. She also developed a new graduate course called Hybrid Systems: Specification, Verification and Control. This project-based course includes topics received directly from industry, and has led to new collaborations and conference publications.

A gifted teacher, she has always received high teaching evaluations from both undergraduate and graduate students. Prof. Ozay is also seen as a keen mentor. She stays late to help students under deadline, and explains corrections to work in detail. In addition to maintaining an active research group of six doctoral students, she takes an active role in supervising master’s students and has mentored over a dozen undergraduate students. Many of those students have gone on to graduate school and published in the leading control conferences.

She also helped initiate a tea hour, called “Control Tea,” which brings together students and faculty from the five departments across the University involved in control systems research.

Prof. Ozay’s research projects have received funding from Ford Motor Company, Toyota, the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the Department of Defense. She is actively applying her research in correct-by-construction control synthesis to autonomous cars in Mcity.

Collaborators note her valued participation in research projects due to both her deep knowledge and ability to contribute pertinent solutions.

Along with the 1938E Award, Prof. Ozay recently earned the Non-Linear Analysis: Hybrid Systems Paper Prize from the International Federation of Automatic Control. She has also received an NSF CAREER Award, a NASA Early Career Faculty Award, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, and a Director’s Fellowship from DARPA.

Prof. Ozay serves as Vice Chair on the IEEE Technical Committee on Computational Aspects of Control System Design, and is a member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Hybrid Systems. She is an Associate Editor for Journal of Discrete Event Dynamic Systems. She also serves as an organizer for the International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems, and recently helped organize the 6th Midwest Workshop on Control and Game Theory, held in Ann Arbor, MI.