Alan Willsky, PhD

Alan S. Willsky is the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering, Emeritus, at MIT, where he spent more than four decades as a leading researcher in signal processing and control theory, earning both his bachelor’s and doctoral degrees from MIT, completing his Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics in 1973 — supported by a Hertz Fellowship beginning in 1969 — with a thesis on dynamical systems defined on groups. He joined the MIT faculty immediately upon graduating and led the Stochastic Systems Group for more than 40 years. He served as director of the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems and professor of both the Signals and Systems and Digital Signal Processing and Control and Estimation Theory courses. 2019 Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal for contributions to stochastic modeling, multiresolution techniques, and control-signal processing synergies. He also received the 1979 Alfred Noble Prize from ASCE, the 1980 Browder J. Thompson Memorial Prize from IEEE, the 2004 Donald G. Fink Award, the 2010 IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award, and the 2013 IEEE Signal Processing Society Award. He is an IEEE Fellow and an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering. He co-founded Alphatech, Inc. (later acquired by BAE Systems), a defense technology firm.