Stephen Yurkovich is a Fellow of the IEEE, and holds a joint appointment as Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering at The Ohio State University, where he served as Acting Director of the Center for Automotive Research in 2007. In 2000 he was awarded the IEEE Control Systems Society Distinguished Member Award, and an IEEE Third Millennium Medal. Professor Yurkovich has won numerous awards at Ohio State University for his research focused on the theory and applications of control systems, in numerous application areas. He has been an author on more than 180 technical publications in journals, edited volumes, and conference proceedings, and has authored and co-authored the books Control Laboratory (Kendall/Hunt, 1992), Fuzzy Control (1998, Addison-Wesley-Longman), and Control Systems Technology Lab (Pearson Custom Publishing, 2004).
In addition to research, Professor Yurkovich’s accomplishments span many facets of control education and education in general. As a direct result of working with many students he has mentored over his career, he has packaged and transferred knowledge on research and technology into public forums, into classroom instruction in the US and abroad, and to engineers in industry. He has taught in the area of control systems for more than 20 years, including courses and workshops abroad in Mexico, Costa Rica and Belgium, and has delivered various invited lectures on his research as well as on education-related topics. He has secured funding in the area of control education from the National Science Foundation and industry, and has undertaken significant curriculum development projects to bring research into the classroom. He has promoted control education in public venues through service in the IEEE Control Systems Society and through his editorial work in IEEE Control Systems Magazine where he initiated and led several education-related activities and special issues. He has been active in continuing education and distance education for industry for more than ten years while at Ohio State, defining and developing several Certificate programs with graduate courses in automotive systems, delivering a wide variety of short courses in control related fields, and developing focused control-related courses for Ohio State students as well as partners in industry. In 2007 he was awarded the General Motors Outstanding Distance Learning Faculty Award. He has also been a leader at Ohio State and in central Ohio in outreach programs from the university to high school students in promotion of engineering as a profession, in his position as Director of the Honda-OSU Partnership program.