ACADEMIA

NJIT Professor Mengchu Zhou has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) based on his distinguished scientific contributions to a variety of research areas in the field of electrical and computer engineering. According to AAAS, Zhou's most notable research has focused on Petri nets, discrete event systems, and their applications to manufacturing, transportation, workflow, disassembly, web services, and software design.

New Fellows will be presented with an official certificate and special pin on Feb. 18, 2012 at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. Election as an AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by peers. This year 539 members have been awarded this honor by AAAS because of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.

Most recently, Zhou, who teaches in the department of electrical and computer engineering in NJIT's Newark College of Engineering, presented two papers at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. Both papers, "Optimal Siphon-based Deadlock Prevention Policy for a Class of Petri Nets in Automation" and "Interference Impacts on ZigBee-based Wireless Mesh Networks for Building Automation and Control" have been published in IEEE Explore, an online publication. At the same conference, Zhou served as a chair for the session entitled "Discrete Event Systems and Petri Nets." He also judged the Franklin V. Taylor Best Paper Award, an event sponsored by the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society. He received this award in 2010. He also was the judge of the overall best student paper award competition.

This past August, Zhou presented three papers at the 2011 IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering in Trieste, Italy. One of his papers entitled "Modeling and Analysis of Dual-Arm Cluster Tools for Wafer Fabrication with Revisiting" was the finalist of "QSI Best Application Paper Award." At this conference, Zhou was elected chair of the steering committee of this series of conferences that he helped found eight years ago. He is also one of the founders of the series of IEEE International Conferences on Networking, Sensing and Control.

Zhou, an IEEE Fellow, is the founding editor of the recently-launched Wiley-IEEE press series on systems science and engineering. He is also editor of IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering. He has authored more than 400 peer-reviewed research papers, 10 books and 18 book chapters. He has made in his career more than 40 invited presentations before notable scholarly groups.

His many honors include the NJIT Harlan J. Perlis Award for Research (1996); The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation's Humboldt Research Award for US Senior Scientists (2000); and the Chinese Association for Science & Technology in the US Achievement Award (2001). Zhou received his doctorate from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.