Hassan K. Khalil

Hassan K. Khalil (born February 20, 1950, in Cairo) is an Egyptian-born American electrical engineer and University Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Michigan State University. He specializes in nonlinear control and singular perturbation theory, and is widely known for his textbook Nonlinear Systems, which received the 2002 IFAC Control Engineering Textbook Prize. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1989 for contributions to singular perturbation theory and its application to control.

Education Khalil received his B.S. (1973) and M.S. (1975) degrees in electrical engineering from Cairo University. Moving to the United States for doctoral studies, he earned his Ph.D. (1978) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under the supervision of Petar V. Kokotovic.

Academic career Khalil joined Michigan State University as an assistant professor in 1978, the same year he completed his doctorate.

A major focus of Khalil's research program at MSU has been the development of high-gain observers for nonlinear feedback control, a tool that originated at the university and has been advanced through the work of his 16 doctoral students and numerous postdoctoral researchers. Khalil has published over 120 journal papers on singular perturbation methods and nonlinear control. He was Program Chair of the 1988 American Control Conference and General Chair of the 1994 conference.

Khalil retired on May 15, 2020, and was granted emeritus status.

Books Singular Perturbation Methods in Control: Analysis and Design (with Petar V. Kokotovic and John O'Reilly), Academic Press, 1986; reprinted by SIAM, 1999. Nonlinear Systems, Macmillan, 1992; 2nd edition, Prentice Hall, 1996; 3rd edition, Prentice Hall, 2002. Nonlinear Control, Pearson, 2015. High-Gain Observers in Nonlinear Feedback Control, SIAM, 2017. Control Systems: An Introduction, Michigan Publishing Services, 2024.

Selected papers

Awards and honors IEEE Fellow (1989), for contributions to singular perturbation theory and its application to control