P. R. Kumar

Biography

Franklin W. Woeltge was born on August 16, 1903, in St. Louis, the son of Frank and Laura Woeltge. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1926 with a B.S. in electrical engineering. While a student at the university, he was a member of the Alpha Beta Chapter of Theta Xi, which he in 1922, the year the fraternity was established. He also participated in the Electrical Engineering Society, the American Institute of Electrical Engineering, and the University of Illinois Band. Mr. Woeltge worked as an engineer in the Avionics and Space Division of Emerson Electric, retiring in 1963. He was an avid reader, dancer and follower of the stock market. He died on December 3, 1998, at the age of 95, leaving behind no family. Yet the years that he spent at the University of Illinois - the only period in his life when he lived outside of St. Louis - clearly meant a great deal to Mr. Woeltge. In his will, he made a substancial bequest to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, making possible the establishment of the Franklin W. Woeltge Professorships.

Research Interest

Wireless Networks, Sensor Networks, Convergence of Control, Communication and Computation, Semiconductor Manufacturing, Manufacturing Systems, Machine Learning, Adaptive Systems, Control, Stochastic Systems, Information Theory, Middleware, Protocol design, Implementation, Software architecture, Control Theory, Optimization.