Aerospace Ph.D. student Dominic Liao-McPherson awarded Professor Pierre T. Kabamba Award

The world is nonlinear, it’s true,

But fear not, for here is a clue:

When signals are small, and stabl’overall

ẋ = Ax will do

—Professor Pierre T. Kabamba

Congratulations to Aerospace Engineering Ph.D student Dominic Liao-McPherson, recipient of the Professor Pierre T. Kabamba Award for graduate student excellence in controls systems. Liao-McPherson researches under Prof. Ilya Kolmanovsky. His work focuses on numerical methods for real-time optimal control, semismooth and variational optimization techniques, and applications in autonomous vehicles, spacecraft, engines, and aircraft.

Liao-McPherson received his Bachelor in Applied Science in Engineering Science, Aerospace Option, from the University of Toronto in 2015.

Liao-McPherson will be honored for his achievement at the College of Engineering Honors Convocation on March 24, 2019, where he will receive a certificate and an honorarium of $1,000.

The award memorializes Professor Pierre T. Kabamba, who is remembered as a distinguished controls engineer and Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan. Born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Professor Kabamba moved to the United States where he received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1981. Soon after, he joined the University of Michigan’s Aerospace Engineering Department in 1983. During his career with the Aerospace Department, Professor Kabama contributed to over 100 journal papers, was elevated to the rank of Fellow of IEE in 1996, and co-authored two control textbooks. He received the Aerospace Engineering Department Teaching Award (1994) and the Silver Shaft Award for Undergraduate Teaching (2002).