Provides society information that may include news, reviews or technical notes that should be of interest to practitioners and researchers.

The contagious coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. Observing the virus spreading rapidly to other countries across the world led the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on 30 January 2020 and to characterize the outbreak as a pandemic on 11 March 2020. In response to the WHO warnings, each country across the world had to design a strategy to mitigate the consequences of the pandemic (see “Summary”).

Q. How would you pitch your Ph.D. dissertation in one paragraph?

Rio de Janeiro is a well-known, international tourist destination, and its charms also attract visitors to its many reputed institutions, among them the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Within the university, the Graduate School of Engineering (COPPE), which is composed of 13 graduate engineering programs, is a center of excellence in engineering. The Control, Automation, and Robotics (CAR) group in the Electrical Engineering Department is one of Brazil’s top research groups, and it is making its presence felt internationally, being slated to host the 2025 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, with group faculty member João Carlos Basilio as general cochair. In this issue of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">IEEE Control Systems</i>, we speak with Amit Bhaya (currently the group head of CAR, COPPE, UFRJ) and a few others in their group.

Hysteresis is a nonlinear phenomenon arising in diverse fields such as mechanics, biology, electronics, and economics <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[1]</xref> (see "Summary"). In particular, hysteresis is ubiquitously exhibited by various smart materials, such as piezoelectrics, magnetostrictives, and shape memory alloys <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[2]</xref> , <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[3]</xref> . These materials show inherent coupling between mechanical properties and electrical/magnetic/thermal fields; therefore, they can be used as sensors and actuators. For different smart material applications, hysteresis is a main source of nonlinearity, which creates challenges in the control of these systems.

He is the recipient of the 2016 ASME Adaptive Structures and Material Systems Prize and the SPIE 2017 Smart Structures and Materials Lifetime Achievement Award, and he was named a Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Fellow in 2018. His research interests include math-ematical modeling and control of smart material systems, Bayesian model calibration, sensitivity analysis, and uncertainty quantification for physical and biological systems.