Stephen P. Boyd – Biography

Stephen P. Boyd is the Samsung Professor of Engineering, and Professor of Electrical Engineering in the Information Systems Laboratory at Stanford University. He also has a courtesy appointment in the Department of Management Science and Engineering, and is member of the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering. His current research focus is on convex optimization applications in control, signal processing, and circuit design.

Professor Boyd received an AB degree in Mathematics, summa cum laude, from Harvard University in 1980, and a PhD in EECS from U. C. Berkeley in 1985. In 1985 he joined the faculty of Stanford’s Electrical Engineering Department. He has held visiting Professor positions at Katholieke University (Leuven), McGill University (Montreal), Ecole Polytechnique Federale (Lausanne), Qinghua University (Beijing), Universite Paul Sabatier (Toulouse), Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm), Kyoto University, Harbin Institute of Technology, NYU, and MIT. He holds an honorary doctorate from Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm.

Professor Boyd is the author of many research articles and three books: Linear Controller Design: Limits of Performance (with Craig Barratt, 1991), Linear Matrix Inequalities in System and Control Theory (with L. El Ghaoui, E. Feron, and V. Balakrishnan, 1994), and Convex Optimization (with Lieven Vandenberghe, 2004). His group has produced several open source tools, including CVX (with Michael Grant), a widely used parser-solver for convex optimization.

Professor Boyd has received many awards and honors for his research in control systems engineering and optimization, including an ONR Young Investigator Award and a Presidential Young Investigator Award. In 1992 he received the AACC Donald P. Eckman Award, which is given annually for the greatest contribution to the field of control engineering by someone under the age of 35. In 1993 he was elected Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Control Systems Society, and in 1999, he was elected Fellow of the IEEE, with citation: “For contributions to the design and analysis of control systems using convex optimization based CAD tools.” He has been invited to deliver more than 50 plenary and keynote lectures at major conferences in both control and optimization.

He currently teaches graduate courses on Linear Dynamical Systems and Convex Optimization, each attracting around 200 students from many departments. From 1988 through 2003 he also taught introductory undergraduate Electrical Engineering courses on Circuits, Signals and Systems, Digital Signal Processing, and Automatic Control, as well an advanced course on Nonlinear Feedback Systems. In 1994 he received the Perrin Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching in the School of Engineering, and in 1991, an ASSU Graduate Teaching Award. In 2003, he received the AACC Ragazzini Education award, for contributions to control education, with citation: “For excellence in classroom teaching, textbook and monograph preparation, and undergraduate and graduate mentoring of students in the area of systems, control, and optimization.”

His website, which makes available past papers, books, software, lecture notes, and selected lecture videos, is visited more than 1.3 million times per year, not counting accesses to iTunes U, Stanford Engineering Everywhere, or MIT Open Course Ware, each of which include courses developed and delivered by Boyd.

At Stanford he has served as director of the Information Systems Laboratory (for ten years), chair of the (university wide) Library Committee, chair of the David Packard EE Building Planning & Design Committee, and as a member of the (university wide) Advisory Board.