Pramod Khargonekar, an Indian American professor at University of California Irvine, serves as principal investigator on a landmark new five-year cooperative agreement to shape America’s future engineering research agenda.
The agreement awarded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Directorate to support the Engineering Research Visioning Alliance (ERVA) provides nearly $8 million in projected funding through August 2031, according to a university release.
“ERVA has demonstrated that the engineering community can be convened with purpose, challenged to think beyond incremental progress, and mobilized to identify research directions with the power to shape the nation’s future as a technology leader,” said Khargonekar, UC Irvine Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
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“As the United States confronts intensifying global competition, rapid technological change, urgent national priorities, and expanding opportunities for engineering-led discovery, ERVA is ready to serve as the neutral, agile, and trusted convener that helps the community see farther and act sooner,” he said.
Administered by University-Industry Demonstration Partnership(UIDP), ERVA brings together leaders from academia, industry, government, national laboratories, and the broader engineering community to identify emerging opportunities and develop strategic research directions with the potential to generate significant national and societal benefits.
ERVA’s visioning activities convene experts across disciplines and sectors to examine complex challenges, identify critical knowledge and technology gaps, and articulate high-impact, high-reward engineering research opportunities.
The resulting reports provide research frameworks for federal agencies, universities, companies, national laboratories, foundations, and other organizations that shape or support the nation’s research enterprise.
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Khargonekar has more than four decades of experience as a scholar, educator and leader in academic institutions and government organizations. He is an expert in control and systems theory, cyber-physical systems, and applications to manufacturing, renewable energy and smart grids, biomedical engineering.
He has been working on the confluence of machine learning & artificial intelligence and for control and estimation. He has contributed to key emerging topics such as Future of Work, Energy System Transformation, Food-Energy-
Recently, he co-led the chapter on climate change mitigation and adaptation for Control for Societal-scale Challenges: Road Map 2030 created by a large group in IEEE Control Systems Society.
With a BTech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, Khargonekar did his MS in Mathematics and PhD, in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida.