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Professor Ly received undergraduate degrees in Aeronautics and Mathematics at the University of California, Davis in 1975. He completed graduate studies in Applied Mechanics and Aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology in 1976 and 1978, respectively. In 1980 he took a two-year leave of absence from The Boeing Company to pursue his doctorate in Aeronautics at Stanford. In 1986 Professor Ly spent a sabbatical year at the Australian National University in Canberra to work with Professors B.D.O. Anderson and J.B. Moore in the field of controller order reduction. He was invited to give a joint workshop with Professor J. Vagners on Flight Control and Estimation at the National Cheng Kung University in 1988. Other short courses on the subject of robust multivariable control were also given to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1990 and at the 1992 AIA&A Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) Conference. He was also a member of the AIAA GNC Technical committee and served as Technical Program Chair for the 1992 AIAA GNC Conference. He recently spent a summer at JPL as NASA 2002 Summer Faculty Fellow working on an improved track control system for future DSN antennas with the design tool SANDY.

Professor Ly's research interests are in the area of robust multivariable control and optimization with applications to flight control systems. His past research on active control has contributed to the improvement of ride quality on the Boeing 777 commercial transport. Recent research activities are in the development of practical design approaches to multivariable control, H_2 and H_inf optimization, and in the presence of control saturation. This research has culminated into the development of an advanced design tool SANDY for multivariable control synthesis applicable to both continuous and sampled-data systems.Research interests of Prof. Ly focus on technologies that support autonomous UAV flight control development, innovative flight control concepts, real-time flight simulation, rapid prototyping of embedded systems for control law implementation, advanced flight avionics, and flight testings.

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