John N. Tsitsiklis was born in Thessaloniki, Greece, in 1958. He received the B.S. degree in Mathematics (1980), and the B.S. (1980), M.S. (1981) and Ph.D. (1984) degrees in Electrical Engineering, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
During the academic year 1983-84, he was an acting assistant professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, Stanford, California. Since 1984, he has been with the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is currently a Clarence J Lebel Professor of Electrical Engineering. He has served as acting co-director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (Spring 1996 and 1997), and as a co-director of the Operations Research Center (2002-2005).
He has been a visitor with the Dept. of EECS at the University of California at Berkeley, and the Institute for Computer Science in Iraklion, Greece. His research interests are in the fields of systems, optimization, control, and operations research. He has coauthored more than 100 journal papers in these areas. He is also a coinventor in seven awarded U.S. patents.
He is a coauthor of Parallel and Distributed Computation: Numerical Methods (1989, with D. Bertsekas), Neuro-Dynamic Programming (1996, with D. Bertsekas), Introduction to Linear Optimization (1997, with D. Bertsimas), and Introduction to Probability (2002, with D. Bertsekas).
He has been a recipient of an IBM Faculty Development Award (1983), an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1986), an Outstanding Paper Award by the IEEE Control Systems Society (1986), the M.I.T. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award (1989), the Bodossaki Foundation Prize (1995), and the INFORMS Computer Science Technical Section prize (1997). He is a Fellow of the IEEE (1999) and of INFORMS (2007). In 2007, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
He was a plenary speaker at the 1992 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, the 2000 MTNS Conference, and the 2007 Allerton Conference. He has been an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Automatica, Applied Mathematics Letters, and Mathematics of Operations Research. He is currently a member of the editorial board for the Springer-Verlag "Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences" series. Finally, he was a member of the National Council on Research and Technology in Greece (2005-2007).