Zigang Pan was born in 1968 in Shanghai, China. He received his B.S. degree in Automatic Control from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 1990, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1992 and 1996, respectively. In 1996, he was a Research Engineer at the Center for Control Engineering and Computation at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In the same year, he joined the Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, NY, (now the Tandon School of Engineering at the New York University) as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering for two years. Afterwards, he joined the faculty of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, P. R. China, in the Department of Automation. In January 2001, he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Cincinnati as an Assistant Professor. Since 2005, he is pursuing research on hisown interest.
His current research interest lie in optimality-guided robust adaptive control for single-input and single-output linear systems, and its generalization to multiple-input and multiple-output systems, as well as nonlinear systems. To solidify his background knowledge in mathematics for the control theory research, he has been working on this book for sixteen years.
He was a co-winner of the 1995 George Axelby Best Paper Award of the IEEE Transaction on Automatic Control together with Professor Tamer Basar of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a Silver prize winner in the 28th International Mathematical Olympiad. He is a member of the IEEE and the AMS and an affiliate of IFAC.