Kumpati Narendra

Kumpati S. Narendra is Harold W. Cheel Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the director of the Center for Systems Science in the Electrical Engineering Department at Yale University.

He received the degree of Bachelor of Engineering with honors in electrical engineering in 1954 from the University of Madras (now Anna University) in India, and MS and PhD degrees in applied physics from Harvard University in 1955 and 1959, respectively. From 1959 to 1961 he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Engineering and Applied Physics at Harvard. 

After serving from 1961 to 1965 as an assistant professor at Harvard, he moved to Yale as an associate professor from 1965 to 1967 and was appointed professor in 1968. He was the chairman of the Electrical Engineering department from 1984 to 1987. In 1981 the Center for Systems Science was created at Yale, and he has been the director of the center ever since. In 2003 he was named Harold W. Cheel Professor of Electrical Engineering, a position he held until he retired in 2021.

Professor Narendra received seven distinguished prizes including the Neural Network Pioneer Award/Medal of the IEEE (Computational) Intelligence Society in 2008, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by his alma mater, the University of Madras, in 1995 and by the University of Ireland, Maynooth, in 2007.

He is a Life Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, Fellow of the Institute of Electrical Engineers, U. K., Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control. He has been a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at JPL Laboratory, and a Walton Fellow in Ireland. He was made a member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering in 1995.

Professor Narendra is the author of three books: Frequency Domain Criteria for Absolute Stability; Stable Adaptive Systems; and Learning Automata – An Introduction. He is also the editor of four other books: Applications of Adaptive Control; Adaptive and Learning Systems: Theory and Applications; Advances in Adaptive Control; and Special Issue on Learning Automata.

He has been a member of various international advisory committees. These include the advisory committee of the Center for Intelligent Control, National University of Singapore, the Committee of the Institute of Advanced Engineering, Seoul, South Korea, the Hamilton Institute in the University of Ireland, and the Center for Intelligent Systems of PESIT, India.

Professor Narendra has served on numerous national and international editorial boards. He has also been a consultant to sixteen major corporations in the United States during the period 1959 to 2010. Over the past six decades Professor Narendra has lectured in over 200 universities throughout the world.

In 2003 he received the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award, the highest award of the American Automatic Control Council (AACC) “in recognition of his pioneering contributions to stability theory, adaptive and learning systems theory and for inspiring leadership as mentor, advisor, and teacher over a period spanning four decades.”