Rifat Sipahi

Rifat Sipahi is a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, where he is also an associate chair of Undergraduate Affairs. He serves as program director of the Master of Science in Robotics and a faculty advisor in the Master of Science in Mechatronics concentration.

Sipahi’s research focuses on developing control algorithms and design tools for dynamical systems affected by delays due to computation times, data transmission, and human reaction times. He investigates the interplay between stability and the underlying graph topology of network dynamical systems/multi-agent systems. He also examines the coupling between human-machine systems with a focus on human reaction delays and machine assistance. Sipahi studies the effects of how connected vehicles and human-operated vehicles together will influence the dynamics of vehicle platoons at the face of jam formations; and the development of computational tools to perform inferences and causality analysis with real-world data.

Sipahi’s research has been funded primarily by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He is the author of the book, Mastering Frequency Domain Techniques for the Stability Analysis of LTI Time Delay Systems (Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics); and co-author of an article in Nature Human Behaviour.

Sipahi is the recipient of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Dynamic Systems and Control Division Outstanding Young Investigator Award, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, the College of Engineering Martin W. Essigmann Outstanding Teaching Award, and the College of Engineering Faculty Fellow Award. He is an active member of the ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Division and was involved in various roles in conferences under ASME, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the International Federation of Automatic Control. Sipahi has been named an ASME Fellow and an IEEE senior member. He currently serves as an associate editor for Automatica.

As a postdoctoral fellow in the Heudiasyc Labs jointly run by the Universite de Technologie de Compiegne and the French National Centre for Scientific Research, Sipahi was awarded a Chateaubriand scholarship by the French government. He received a master’s and a doctoral degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Connecticut and a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from Istanbul Technical University.