János Gertler

During his university studies, he received a People's Republic scholarship and worked as a demonstrator at the Department of Theoretical Electricity of the Budapest University of Technology (BME).

His first job was at the Electric Power Research Institute (VILLENKI), where he worked in the Automation Department led by Tibor Vámos (here - among other tasks - he worked on the development of the "Fétis" digital process control system).

In 1965, he moved to the BME, to the Department of Automation of Professor Frigyes Csáki, where he taught the subject Control Engineering.

Between 1967 and 1981, he worked at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' Automation Research Institute (AKI) and then at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' Computer Science and Automation Research Institute (SZTAKI), where he researched various methods of computer process control. For ten years, he was the Institute's deputy scientific director, alongside director Tibor Vámos.

In 1967, he spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto in Canada, and in 1977, he was a visiting professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, USA. From 1981, he worked again at the latter university, and then spent a year at New York Polytechnic University, where he was associate dean of the engineering faculty. From 1985 until his retirement in 2016, he was a professor at George Mason University (Fairfax, Virginia). At the above universities, he mainly taught control engineering and signal processing subjects.

From 1984, for about 20 years, he worked on methods for computer-aided detection and diagnosis of faults in engineering systems. He reported his results in about 180 publications and was a plenary speaker at many international conferences. He wrote one of the first comprehensive monographs on engineering diagnostics (Fault Detection and Diagnosis in Engineering Systems, Marcel Dekker, New York, 1998). His work has been cited in the scientific literature by over 7,500 people, of which over 3,000 are for books.
As a result of several years of research collaboration with the development departments of General Motors, his method is successfully used in real-time engine diagnostics of mass-produced cars.

He earned his candidate's degree in 1967 and his academic doctorate in 1980. In 1995, he was elected an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; he held his chair in 1996 with the title "Systems Technology and Engine Diagnostics".

In the 2000s, he analyzed the effects of manufacturing relocation abroad on the American economy, using macroeconomic modeling methods.

He has held various senior positions in the International Federation of Automation (IFAC) for a long time: he was the chairman of the Computers Committee, the “Policy” Committee and the Publications Committee for 3 years each. He has been a member for 35 years, including 6 years as chairman of the IFAC-Elsevier Publications Board. He was the editor-in-chief of the IFAC Symposium Proceedings series for 10 years and the journal Annual Reviews in Control for 18 years. He has been a permanent advisor to the organization since 1999.

Honors: Fellow of the IEEE (American Electrical and Electronics Association, 1998); Fellow of IFAC (IFAC, 2005); Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award (Marquis Who's Who Publications Board, 2018).