Zak Kassas

Zak Kassas is the TRC Endowed Chair in Intelligent Transportation Systems and a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The Ohio State University (OSU). He is the Director of the Autonomous Systems Perception, Intelligence, and Navigation (ASPIN) Laboratory. He is also the Director of the U.S. Department of Transportation Center: CARMEN (Center for Automated Vehicle Research with Multimodal AssurEd Navigation), focusing on navigation resiliency and security of highly automated transportation systems. He received a B.E. with Honors in Electrical Engineering from the Lebanese American University, an M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The Ohio State University, and an M.S.E. in Aerospace Engineering and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin.

He received from President Biden in 2025 the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers early in their careers. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the Institute of Navigation (ION), and a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Aerospace & Electronic Systems Society and the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society. He was ranked in 2025 by ScholarGPS as the top scholar in the world in the field of Navigation. He authored more than 220 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, 15 magazine articles, 3 invited book chapters, and 27 U.S. patents. He received 60+ scientific and governmental awards, among which the 2018 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, 2019 Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Program (YIP) award, 2022 Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) YIP award, 2018 IEEE Walter Fried Award, 2018 & 2025 ION Samuel Burka Award, 2019 ION Col. Thomas Thurlow Award, 2020 IEEE Signal Processing Society grand prize, 2022 IEEE Harry Rowe Mimno Award, 2025 IEEE Richard Kershner Award, and 2025 IEEE Frederick W. Ellersick Award. His students have won several awards, including four Best Ph.D. Dissertation awards (from IEEE, ION, OSU); three US DOT Graduate Student of the Year awards; and 40+ best paper, student paper, and paper presentation awards.

He started his academic career in 2014 at the University of California, Riverside; then was an Associate Professor at University of California, Irvine; then was very early promoted to Full Professor and joined The Ohio State University in 2022. Since starting his academic career, his research has attracted more than $28 million in competitive federal grants from ONR, NSF, AFOSR, DOT, NASA, NIST, Sandia National Laboratories, the Aerospace Corporation, among others. His research was featured in dozens of national and international media outlets (Science, BBC, Forbes, IEEE, ACM, Ars Technica, MIT Technology Review, among others) and appeared on 9 magazine covers. He has given 120+ invited presentations, keynotes, and plenaries, and served as a subject matter expert to DOD, GAO, DOT, NSF, and FCC. He is a Senior Editor of IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems and an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, and was a Senior Editor of IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles. He was the Program Chair of IEEE/ION PLANS 2020 & 2023 and General Chair of ION Cognizant Autonomous Systems for Safety Critical Applications (CASSCA) 2018 & 2019. He was involved in organizing numerous conferences, workshops, and special sessions at IEEE/ION PLANS, ION GNSS+, ION ITM, IEEE VTC, IEEE ICASSP, IEEE ITSC, ACC, FUSION, and IFAC AAC. His research interests include navigation systems, low Earth orbit satellites, cognitive sensing and software-defined radio, intelligent transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, and cyber-physical systems.