The London Digital Twin Research Centre welcome the new appointment of Professor Azad M. Madni, a recipient of 2023 NAE Gordon Prize and 2023 IEEE Simon Ramo Medal, to be a member of the Advisory Board. It is exciting time ahead to work with Professor Madni in driving digital twin research forward in UK/Europe and world at large.
Azad M. Madni is a University Professor of Astronautics, Aerospace, and Mechanical Engineering in the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering. The University Professor designation honours the university’s most accomplished, multi-disciplinary faculty, who have significant achievements in multiple technical disciplines. He is the holder of the Northrop Grumman Fred O’Green Chair in Engineering and the Executive Director of USC’s Systems Architecting and Engineering Program. He is the Founding Director of USC’s Distributed Autonomy and Intelligent Systems Laboratory. He is also a Professor in USC’s Keck School of Medicine and Rossier School of Education. He is a faculty affiliate of the Keck School’s Ginsberg Institute for Biomedical Therapeutics. He is the founder and CEO of Intelligent Systems Technology, Inc., a hi-tech company specialising in transdisciplinary model-based approaches for tackling complex sociotechnical systems problems. He is a member of the Phi Kappa Phi honour society, and Omega Alpha Association, an international systems engineering honour society.
Madni is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and recipient of the prestigious 2023 NAE Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education. A Life Fellow of IEEE, he is also the recipient of the 2023 IEEE Simo Ramo Medal. He is an Honorary Member of ASME and a Life Fellow/Fellow of AAAS, AIAA, INCOSE, IISE, AIMBE, IETE, AAIA, SDPS, and the Washington Academy of Sciences. He is the recipient of approximately 80 prestigious international and national awards from eleven different professional societies. These include the 2019 IEEE AESS Pioneer Award and the 2011 INCOSE Pioneer Award. He has 400+ publications comprising authored and edited books, book chapters, journal articles, peer-reviewed conference publications, and research reports. He has given more than 75 keynotes and invited talks in international conferences and workshops. He is a member of two NAE Lifetime Giving Societies: the Marie Curie Society and the Albert Einstein Society.
He pioneered the field of transdisciplinary systems engineering and wrote an award-winning book, Transdisciplinary Systems Engineering: Exploiting Convergence in a Hyperconnected World (Springer, 2018) that presented the founding principles of transdisciplinary systems engineering. He is also the creator of TRASEETM, a new engineering education paradigm based on transdisciplinary systems engineering principles. He is also the co-author of Tradeoff Decisions in System Design (Springer, 2016), Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Springer series on Systems Engineering Research, and co-author of 3 Ds of Deep Learning – Design, Development, and Deployment (Springer, 2023). He is the Co-Editor-in-Chief with Norm Augustine of the Handbook on Model Based Systems Engineering (Springer, 2023).
He transformed USC’s Systems Architecting and Engineering Program based on TRASEE and provided a blueprint for other graduate engineering programs to follow. Under his leadership, the program has graduated 3200+ students and is recognized as a top graduate engineering program in the country. He has served as Principal Investigator on 97 R&D contracts and grants totaling more than $100M. His research areas are Theory of Digital Twins, AI and Machine Learning in Adaptive Cyber-Physical-Human Systems, Model Based Systems Engineering, and Green Learning. Previously, he was the Executive Vice President for R&D and the Chief Technology Officer of Perceptronics Inc., a simulation-based training and AI company that went public in 1982. Prior to that, as a lead simulation engineer at Rockwell International on NASA’s Space Shuttle Program, he led the development of a model-based testing approach that generated substantial savings in navigation system performance testing for the Shuttle Programme. He received his Ph.D., M.S., and B.S. in Engineering from UCLA with a major in Engineering Systems and minors in Computer Methodology and AI. He is also a graduate of AEA/Stanford Executive Institute.