COLLEGE STATION, Texas, April 24, 2012 – Juergen Hahn, associate professor in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University, has been named policy committee chair of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC).

Hahn is the lone U.S. representative on the executive board of IFAC – considered the chief organization for all process controls professionals, regardless of which discipline in which they work. The chair of the policy committee is an ex-officio member of the board.

As committee chair, Hahn will be largely responsible for participating in the strategic planning process that IFAC has recently initiated.

At Texas A&M, Hahn conducts research that focuses on the development of new systems analysis techniques and their application in systems biology as well as for traditional chemical engineering processes. Applications of these techniques include sensitivity analysis of signal transduction pathways, image analysis techniques for fluorescence microscopy images, model reduction for controller design and experimental and sensor network design.

He is a recipient of the prestigious Computing and Systems Technology Outstanding Young Researcher Award and holder of the Ray Nesbitt Development Professorship II in Chemical Engineering. He also serves on the editorial board of the journal "Control Engineering Practice" and the "Journal of Process Control," the premier journal for process control research. In addition, he is associate editor for “Automatica,” the flagship journal of IFAC.

Hahn completed his undergraduate career at RWTH Aachen University in Germany, earned his Ph.D. at The University of Texas at Austin in 2002 and joined Texas A&M the following year.

IFAC seeks to promote the science and technology of control in the broadest sense in all systems in both theory and application. IFAC also is concerned with the impact of control technology on society.