Speakers

Dr. Miroslav Krstic is Distinguished Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, holds the Alspach endowed chair, and is the founding director of the Cymer Center for Control Systems and Dynamics at UC San Diego. He also serves as Senior Associate Vice Chancellor for Research at UCSD. As a graduate student, Krstic won the UC Santa Barbara best dissertation award and student best paper awards at CDC and ACC. Krstic has been elected Fellow of seven scientific societies - IEEE, IFAC, ASME, SIAM, AAAS, IET (UK), and AIAA (Assoc. Fellow) - and as a foreign member of the Academy of Engineering of Serbia. He has received the ASME Oldenburger Medal, Nyquist Lecture Prize, Paynter Outstanding Investigator Award, Ragazzini Education Award, Chestnut textbook prize, the PECASE, NSF Career, and ONR Young Investigator awards, the Axelby and Schuck paper prizes, and the first UCSD Research Award given to an engineer. Krstic has also been awarded the Springer Visiting Professorship at UC Berkeley, the Distinguished Visiting Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Invitation Fellowship of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and honorary professorships from several universities in China.

He serves as Senior Editor in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and Automatica, as editor of two Springer book series, and has served as Vice President for Technical Activities of the IEEE Control Systems Society and as chair of the IEEE CSS Fellow Committee. Krstic has coauthored twelve books on adaptive, nonlinear, and stochastic control, extremum seeking, control of PDE systems including turbulent flows, and control of delay systems.

Rick Azer is Associate Vice President for Black & Veatch and a founding member of the company’s Growth Accelerator. Rick commercializes new technologies and service offerings that extend the company’s position as a leader in critical human infrastructure. Rick has led many of Black & Veatch’s advanced transportation initiatives, including nationwide networks of high power EV Charging stations, Hyperloop feasibility studies, autonomous vehicle and smart city mobility infrastructure projects. Prior to joining Black & Veatch, Rick worked for a number of years at Qualcomm. He is Co-Chair for Cleantech San Diego. Rick has a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Design from Arizona State University, and a Master’s of Architecture and MBA from Washington University, Saint Louis.

Dr. Christina A. Back is Vice President of Nuclear Technologies and Materials at General Atomics. She is an internationally recognized expert in both fission and fusion energy research, with over 25 years of experience leading research in private industry and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories. She regularly serves on committees for the National Academy of Sciences and the DOE. In addition, she has participated in the White House Summit on Nuclear Energy and provided testimony to U.S. Congressional Committees.

Dr. Back earned her B.S. in physics from Yale University, and her Ph.D. in plasma physics from the University of Florida. Prior to coming to GA, she spent two years at the Ecole Polytechnique LULI laser facility in France, and over fifteen years at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the fusion program. She has over one hundred peer-reviewed publications in research areas that include radiative heating, opacity, x-ray conversion efficiency, spectroscopy, hohlraum physics, charged-particle diagnostics, materials synthesis, inertial confinement fusion and nuclear energy. In 2004, she was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Dr. Back believes nuclear energy must be part of the mix to meet U.S. and global energy needs. She is committed to bringing innovation through engineered materials and advanced technologies to make transformational advances in nuclear energy. At General Atomics, Dr. Back is responsible for nuclear fission programs and related technology development. Her major programs focus on advanced and mobile nuclear reactors, accident-tolerant nuclear fuel and energy storage systems to ensure that the world has clean, safe, cost-competitive energy for today, and tomorrow.

Farhat Beg is a Professor of Engineering Physics in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego and Director of Center for Energy Research. His expertise are in the field of laser plasma interaction, pulsed power driven X- and Z-pinches, and neutron sources. He has published over 200 papers in refereed journals, including Nature, Nature Physics, Nature Communications and Physical Review Letters, with total citations exceeding 6000, with an H-index of 41 according to the ISI Web of Knowledge. He is also a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) . He was awarded the Department of Junior Faculty Award (2005) and IEEE Early Career Award (2008). He has been serving as Chair of the High-Energy Density Science Association (HEDSA). The HEDSA is an association of scientists from academia that promote High-Energy Density Laboratory Plasma in universities and small businesses, as well as in national laboratories. It also advocates new initiatives to maintain the health of High-Energy Density Science and the related workforce in the United States, including the formation of a High-Energy Density Science Users Program.

Mike Ferry is the Director of Energy Storage and Systems at UC San Diego, overseeing campus research on the development and deployment of advanced energy storage technologies and the integration of renewable generation, including technical and commercial demonstration projects to improve the performance of renewable energy systems and microgrid operations, cost-benefit and market analysis, and the promotion of multi-disciplinary frameworks to enable large-scale storage and renewable energy adoption. His energy research also involves electric transportation including EV charging infrastructure, vehicle-grid integration (VGI), and second-life EV battery research. Mike holds a Master of Science degree from the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley.