ECE Professor Kaiqing Zhang Receives Donald P. Eckman Award

ECE faculty member Kaiqing Zhang has received the 2026 Donald P. Eckman Award from the American Automatic Control Council (AACC), for his work in (reinforcement) learning in mult-agent systems and dynamic games, and applications in generative-AI agents and robotics.

Professor Zhang joined ECE in 2022 after postdoc positions with the Laboratory for Information & Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and as a Research Fellow at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at Berkeley.

Zhang received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2021 after earning double M.S. degrees in ECE and Applied Math from the same institution. He earned a B.E. in Automation and a second Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Tsinghua University in China.

His research interests include control theory, robotics, game theory, reinforcement learning, economics and decision theory, machine learning, and autonomy.

In 2021, Zhang received a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) Ph.D. Thesis Award for his dissertation, “Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Agent and Robust Control Systems: Towards Large-scale and Reliable Autonomy.”

In 2025, he was awarded an NSF CAREER Award for his proposal on the Theoretical Foundations of Multi-agent Learning in Dynamic Environments. He is also a recipient of a few other awards, including the Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowship, ICML Outstanding Paper Award, AAAI New Faculty Highlights, AFOSR YIP Award, invited publication at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), and faculty awards from Cisco Research, JP Morgan, and Open Philanthropy. In 2025, he was also recognized by UMD ECE with the George Corcoran Memorial Award for Faculty in recognition of his exemplary contributions to teaching and education leadership. He also served as a program committee member at IEEE CDC and IFAC World Congress, area chair at NeurIPS, ICLR, and AISTATS, and senior area chair at ICML and AAAI.

Since 1964, the Donald P. Eckman Award has been an award given by the American Automatic Control Council recognizing outstanding achievements by a young researcher under the age of 35 in the field of control theory. Together with the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award, the Eckman Award is one of the most prestigious awards in control theory. Born in 1915, Donald Eckman earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Cornell University in 1948. Following that, he joined the faculty of the Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, Ohio, which later became Case Western University. In a short period of time, he became internationally recognized in the fields of automatic control and systems engineering. At the age of 47, his life ended after a tragic automobile accident.

Founded in 1957, the AACC promotes research in control theory. Its mission is to coordinate cooperation among multiple groups representing various aspects of the automatic control profession within the United States. It also represents the US in the control theory field in international events and research activities.

Published June 18, 2026