Siva S. Banda

Siva Subrahmanyam Banda (born 1951) is an Indian-American aerospace engineer. He is Director of the Control Science Center of Excellence and senior scientist for Control Theory for the Air Vehicles Directorate at the United States Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He has taught at Wright State University, the University of Dayton, and the Air Force Institute of Technology.

Background
Siva Banda was born in Andhra Pradesh, India. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the Regional Engineering College, Warangal, India in 1974, followed by a Master of Science degree in aerospace engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India in 1976. He then came to the United States and attended college briefly at the University of Cincinnati before transferring to Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, where he earned another Master of Science in systems engineering in 1978. Banda continued to further his studies and completed his Ph.D. in aerospace engineering at the University of Dayton in 1980. His doctoral dissertation was entitled Maximum likelihood identification of aircraft lateral parameters with unsteady aerodynamic modeling.

Career
Dr. Banda joined the U.S. Air Force Flight Dynamics Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in 1981 as an aerospace research engineer in the Flight Controls Division. He started his career as an in-house researcher. He then served as group leader and program manager before being promoted to branch chief. He now serves as the Director of the Control Science Center of Excellence and Senior Scientist for the Air Vehicles Directorate at the United States Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He has also acted as a consultant, mentor, and technical leader for basic research in flight control systems. He has made pioneering and lasting contributions to the areas of robust multivariable control theory dealing with uncertainties, on-line system identification, and reconfigurable flight control.

Professional accomplishments
Dr. Banda has authored or co-authored more than 180 articles published in peer-reviewed journals, 15 technical reports and books, and has delivered more than 80 lectures. He is a technical adviser to the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Office of Naval Research, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Research Council and several leading academic institutes worldwide. In the academic arena he has served as thesis adviser and adjunct professor at the Air Force Institute of Technology, Wright State University, and the University of Dayton. He serves on a variety of technical, organizational, and award committees for professional societies including the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He served on the board of Editors for the Advances in Design and Control series published by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He is a Fellow of the Air Force Research Laboratory, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Royal Aeronautical Society.

Awards and honors

 * 1987 General Benjamin D. Foulois Award
 * 1990 Fellow, Air Force Research Laboratory
 * 1993 - 1995 and 2000 - 2005 Air Force Star Team Award
 * 1994 Best Paper Award, AIAA
 * 2000 IEEE Control Systems Technology Award
 * 2001 Royal Aeronautical Society Silver Medal
 * 2001 Evening plenary speaker, IEEE Conference on Decision and Control
 * 2004 Meritorious Senior Professional Presidential Rank Award
 * 2010 President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service

Biography

 * US Air Force official web site

Professional accomplishments

 * Scientific Commons, partial list of publications
 * Scientific Commons, more publications
 * National Academy of Engineering directory
 * University of Tennessee
 * US National Academy of Engineering
 * Amazon listings
 * The Day After Newsmagazine article
 * Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics