UCSB Mechanical Engineering Aluma Hana El-Samad has won the 2011 Donald P. Eckman Award. The Eckman Award is one of the most prestigious awards in control theory. It is given annually to recognize an outstanding young engineer under the age of 35 in the field of Automatic Control.  Hana will receive the award at the 2011 American Control Conference in San Francisco.

The citation reads: "For novel application of control theory in the analysis and synthesis of complex biological systems."

Hana El-Samad obtained her doctorate degree in Mechanical Engineering at UCSB under Prof. Mustafa Khammash. She is currently a faculty member in the department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF and the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3), where she holds the Grace Boyer Junior Endowed Chair in Biophysics and is a Packard Fellow. Hana's research group emphasizes the role of control theory and dynamical systems in the study of biological networks.