Dr. Petros Ioannou is a specialist in systems and control applications and intelligent transport systems and is the Director of the Center of Advanced Transportation Technologies(CATT) at the prestigious University of Southern California.

CATT’s mission is to perform high-impact research on urgent transportation issues in cooperation with industry and government. Its main focus is on the use of advanced technologies for making current and future defence and commercial transportation infrastructure more efficient.

His research interests are in the areas of adaptive control, neural networks, nonlinear systems, vehicle dynamics and control, intelligent transportation systems and marine transportation.

Petros Ioannou received the B.Sc. degree with First Class Honors from University College, London, England, in 1978 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois, in 1980 and 1982, respectively. During the period 1975-1978, he held a Commonwealth Scholarship from the Association of Commonwealth Universities, London, England.

He was awarded several prizes, including the Goldsmid Prize and the A. P. Head Prize from University College, London.  From 1979 to 1982 he was a research assistant at the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois.

In 1982, Dr. Ioannou joined the Department of Electrical Engineering-Systems, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California. He is currently the A.V. ‘Bal’ Balakrishnan Chair Professor in the same Department and the Director of the Center of Advanced Transportation Technologies. He also holds courtesy appointments with the Departments of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and Industrial System Engineering. He is also the Associate Director for Research for the University Transportation Center MATRONS at the University of Southern California and California State University Long Beach.  

He was visiting Professor at the University of Newcastle, Australia and the Australian National University in Canberra during parts of Fall of 1988, the Technical University of Crete in the summer of 1992 and Fall of 2001 and served as the Dean of the School of Pure and Applied Science at the University of Cyprus in 1995.

In 2008/2009 he was a visiting faculty  at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies of the Cyprus University of Technology while on sabbatical leave from the University of Southern California. Dr. Ioannou was the recipient of the Outstanding Transactions Paper Award by the IEEE Control System Society in 1984 and the recipient of a 1985 Presidential Young Investigator Award for his research in Adaptive Control.

In 2009 he received the IEEE ITSS Outstanding ITS Application Award and the 2009 IET Heaviside Medal for Achievement in Control by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (former IEE). In 2012 he received the IEEE ITSS Outstanding ITS Research Award. In 2015 he received the 2016 IEEE Transportation Technologies Field Award. In 2016 he received the Senior Research Award from the Viterbi School of Engineering and the Transition to Practice Award from the IEEE Control System Society.

He is currently the Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. He has been an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, the International Journal of Control, Automatica and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

He also served as Associate Editor at Large of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and Chairman of the IFAC Technical Committee on Transportation Systems. He served as a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Society. He is one of the founders of the Mediterranean Control Association and a member of the Board of Governors.

He was one of the founders of the IEEE Mediterranean Control Conference, which has been taking place annually since 1992 and one of the founders of the University Transportation Center, METRANS, at the University of Southern California and California State University Long Beach.

Dr. Ioannou is a Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), Fellow of AAAS and the author/co-author of 8 books and over 300 research publications in the area of controls, vehicle dynamics, neural networks, nonlinear dynamical systems and intelligent transportation systems.

He served as a technical consultant to several automotive, aerospace and computer/electronics companies and as an expert witness on automotive control and sensor systems and safety.