Matt Harris

College of Engineering: Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Dr. Harris joined the MAE department as an assistant professor in 2019. Prior to this, he worked in industry for five years. He has had three PhD students successfully defend and secure employment in autonomous driving and space guidance areas. He has co-authored 18 papers with graduate students at USU, and one student won the MAE Outstanding Researcher of the Year award. The journal papers have been published in premier venues such as the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Automatica, Nonlinear Dynamics, and IEEE Letters of the Control System Society.

Dr. Harris’ research focus is optimal control, nonlinear control, and optimization specializing in aerospace applications. His research program had seven projects funded (as PI/coPI/coI) totaling $2.1M with $818k directed specifically to the program. Sponsors include ONR, NASA, AFRL, DOE, and AFOSR. As a teacher, Dr. Harris has taught five courses at USU, contributed nearly 800 pages of notes to supplement textbooks, co-authored an open educational resource (OER) book on spacecraft guidance, and been awarded the MAE Teacher of the Year award. He is also the College of Engineering Mentor of the Year.