Mapúa welcomes engineer to its Board of Trustees

THE MAPÚA Board of Trustees recently welcomed the appointment of its new board member, Dr. Jose B. Cruz, Jr.

Dr. Cruz has forged an illustrious career as part of the academic community both in the Philippines and the United States. From 1953 to 1954, Dr. Cruz was an instructor at his alma mater, the University of the Philippines (UP). He is also a professor emeritus in three state universities in the US — he served as the associate head of the university’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California at Irvine, and Dean of College of Engineering at The Ohio State University. Dr. Cruz graduated as the first summa

cum laude of the UP College of Engineering in 1953. He also copped the highest grade in the August 1953 Board Examinations for Assistant Electrical Engineers. Dr. Cruz finished his Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1956 and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana in 1959. Aside from being a professional electrical engineer in the Philippines, he is also a licensed engineer in two states in the US: Illinois and Ohio.

Dr. Cruz garnered several awards and achievements through the years; one of which was his designation as the primus inter pares (first among equals) among the 100 Outstanding Alumni of the UP College of Engineering for the past century in 2010. In the same year, he was also granted the Distinguished Alumni Award for Lifetime Achievement by the University of the Philippines Alumni Engineers, Inc.

Aside from these, the University of the Philippines Alumni Association in America selected Dr. Cruz as the 1989 Most Outstanding Alumnus. He also received the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award from the American Automatic Control Council (AACC) in 1994 in recognition of his contributions to the field of automatic control, sensitivity analysis, feedback theory, and game theoretic control, and for his extraordinary service to the control field. This is the highest recognition of professional achievement for US control systems engineers and scientists given by the AACC.