Zhi-Hong Mao receives 2016 Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award

Zhi-Hong Mao, PhDUniversity of Pittsburgh Chancellor Patrick Gallagher has honored bioengineer Zhi-Hong Mao, PhD, with a 2016 Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award.  Mao is  Associate Professor and William Kepler Whiteford Faculty Fellow in the Departments of Electrical and Computing Engineering and Bioengineering in the Swanson School of Engineering.  His research interests include human-in-the-loop control systems, which are systems that require interaction with a human being, such as driver assistance features in a car. He also studies networked control systems and neural control and learning. Mao has served on at least 50 PhD dissertation committees and 48 master’s thesis panels during his time at Pitt. He has advised 14 visiting students from other universities both within and outside the United States.

Mao received dual bachelor's degrees in automatic control and mathematics from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, in 1995, M.Eng. degree in intelligent control and pattern recognition from Tsinghua University in 1998, S.M. degree in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, in 2000, and PhD in medical engineering and medical physics from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Cambridge, in 2006. He joined the University of Pittsburgh as an Assistant Professor in 2005 and became an Associate Professor in 2011. He was a recipient of the Outstanding Educator Award from the Swanson School  in 2009, the 2010 Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation, Andrew P. Sage Best Transactions Paper Award of the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society in 2010, and Outstanding Service Award as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems in 2013.