Professor Naira HovakimyanNaira Hovakimyan, a MechSE professor and Schaller faculty scholar, has been recognized as a 2011 University Scholar. Bestowed each year upon just a handful of professors university-wide, this prestigious award identifies the university’s most talented teachers, scholars, and researchers.
“I got the letter and I was surprised I had even been nominated,” Hovakimyan said.
Written by By William Bowman
Professor Naira Hovakimyan
Naira Hovakimyan, a MechSE professor and Schaller faculty scholar, has been recognized as a 2011 University Scholar. Bestowed each year upon just a handful of professors university-wide, this prestigious award identifies the university’s most talented teachers, scholars, and researchers.
“I got the letter and I was surprised I had even been nominated,” Hovakimyan said.
A rarity in Mechanical Science and Engineering, Hovakimyan received her Ph.D. in physics and mathematics, not engineering, at the Institute of Applied Mathematics of Russian Academy of Sciences, in Moscow. Her math expertise has enabled her to address a long-standing open problem in adaptive control theory, which provides new opportunities for addressing control problems in the presence of large uncertainties, breaking new ground toward avoiding certain catastrophic airplane crashes.
Over the last three years NASA Langley Research Center has intensively flight-tested Hovakimyan’s L1 adaptive controller for various failure scenarios using the subscale commercial jet of AirSTAR. The pilots confidently flew the L1 controller into stall and post-stall flight regimes and were able to hold the aircraft at departure prone edges of the flight envelope long enough to enable real-time modeling of unsteady aerodynamics in those conditions. The post-stall flight envelope was expanded up to 28 degrees in angle of attack.
Hovakimyan’s book, L1 Adaptive Control Theory, coauthored by her former postdoctoral student Chengyu Cao, was published in 2010 by the Society for Industrial & Applied Mathematics. For the success of the flight tests at NASA Hovakimyan gives the credit to her student Enric Xargay from Aerospace Engineering Department.
The University Scholar award includes a $10,000 prize for each of three years to use toward enhancing her academic career, including equipment, travel, books, or even research assistants. Funding for the program comes from private gifts to the Advancement Fund of the University of Illinois.