School names ‘team player’ a distinguished professor
Dr. Meir Pachter has been selected as the Air Force Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Engineering and Management’s newest distinguished professor. This distinction is reserved for individuals who have displayed exceptional, lifelong performance and achievement as a graduate school faculty member.
Pachter is an internationally recognized expert in the Air Force mission-critical area of intelligent autonomous control and navigation of aerospace systems with a current focus on unmanned aerial vehicles and air-toair operations. He has published more than 100 refereed journal articles and has received more than $2.3 million in research funding, primarily from the Air Force Research Laboratory.
“Professor Pachter is a team player. During the last 29 years, Dr. Pachter has worked tirelessly and on a daily basis with a 6.1 group at AFRL/RQ and has significantly contributed to the research enterprise,” said Dr. Siva Banda, chief scientist of AFRL’s Aerospace Systems Directorate.
Pachter earned his doctorate in applied mathematics from the Israel Institute of Technology. He first arrived at AFIT as a flight control chair visiting professor in 1990 and became a permanent faculty member in 1993 with his appointment as associate professor of Electrical Engineering. As a research advisor, he has graduated 16 doctoral students and 46 master’s students.
“Meir is a strong mentor to junior faculty and students. I have never known him to turn down the chance to collaborate on an effort or just to give his advice when difficult problems arise,” said Dr. Kenneth Hopkinson, professor and head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Pachter is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which recognizes his high levels of impact in the field of electrical engineering, with a special focus on optimization, guidance and control theory. He serves as an associate editor for the “Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications” and as the chairman of the International Federation of Automatic Control’s working group on Differential Games and Multiple Criteria Decision Making.
Pachter is the sixth graduate school faculty member to receive the distinguished professor designation since its inception in 2009. Others are Dr. Shankar Mall (2009), Dr. Anthony Palazotto (2011), Dr. Marlin Thomas (2012), Dr. Richard Deckro (2014) and Dr. Mark Goltz (2014).