Peter Seiler receives CoE Monroe-Brown Foundation Education Excellence Award

Prof. Peter Seiler has received the 2025 Monroe-Brown Foundation Service Excellence Award from the College of Engineering for his extraordinary commitment to teaching and student success.

“Pete Seiler is a master at teaching,” said colleague Cindy Finelli, the David C. Munson, Jr. Collegiate Professor of Engineering. “He is an outstanding educator at U-M who is well regarded by both students and colleagues.”

Students have remarked on his openness to questions, well-organized lectures, and enthusiasm in his classes, as well as his excellence as a research mentor.

In the past five years, Seiler has taught five different courses, ranging from the foundational undergraduate level course in Signals and Systems (EECS 216) to specialized graduate courses in Control. In addition, he has served as advisor to 16 undergraduate students in specialized multidisciplinary research projects, for which they received course credit.

He developed a MATLAB demo for EECS 216 to help them visualize the math, and these demos have become integral to the course, which is taught by several different faculty members.

It takes extra work on the part of an instructor to “flip” a classroom so that in-class lectures are replaced by periods of active learning, but when done properly, the style can enhance student learning. Seiler did this for one of his regularly-taught classes, EECS 460 (Control Systems Analysis and Design), and his high teaching scores show how much the students appreciate his efforts. He also introduced innovations for this class such as randomized exams, where each student’s take-home exam had different data, and an autograder system that allowed him to focus on interpreting incorrect answers and providing valuable feedback.

The pre-lecture videos, course notes, and in-class problems that he developed for EECS 460 are the basis of a 12-week virtual course for NASA engineers.

He also developed the graduate level course “Convex Optimization Methods in Control,” which attracts students from a variety of engineering departments.

Seiler’s research focuses on robust control theory, and the impact of model uncertainty on systems design. He also investigates the use of robust control techniques to better understand optimization algorithms and model-free reinforcement learning methods.

He has graduated 18 PhD students and currently advises another 8 PhD students. He has also served on an additional 40 dissertation committees and advised 10 master’s students.

Seiler is currently the Associate Chair for Graduate Studies, former Technical Area Director for Control and Robotics, and has been faculty advisor for Michigan Engineering OnRamp, which supports underserved and underrepresented communities.

Seiler received the HKN Professor of the Year award in 2023, which is an award voted on entirely by students. He did this after being at the university for just three years, having joined the department in 2020 as an associate professor. In addition, he has received an NSF CAREER Award, several best paper awards, and is a Fellow of IEEE.