Honor for EECS professor Tomlin takes her — and College of Engineering dean Sastry — to Sweden for spring 2010 semester

Prompted by a prestigious award to his wife, Berkeley professor Claire Tomlin, Shankar Sastry has announced plans to take a semester-long leave of absence as dean of the College of Engineering to join her in Sweden.

Tomlin, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, has been honored with the Tage Erlander Professorship, established by the Swedish government to bring internationally recognized researchers to the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm for collaborative research and teaching. A MacArthur Foundation “genius award” recipient and an authority in embedded systems and software and in computational systems biology, Tomlin plans to spend the spring 2010 semester working with a team of leading researchers to explore applications in the area of cancer treatment.

Sastry will join Tomlin and their young son as a visiting professor at KTH, working with a research team on the trustworthiness of cyber-physical systems. He will also devote time to two textbooks, one in hybrid and embedded control and another in statistical learning and computer vision. The family will return to Berkeley in the summer of 2010.

During Sastry’s absence, Albert Pisano, chair of the mechanical-engineering department, will serve as acting dean, with mechanical-engineering professor David Dornfeld acting as department chair.