Petar Kokotovic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1934. He received his B.S. and M.S. from the University of Belgrade, and his Ph.D. from the Academy of Sciences Institute in Moscow. In 1965, Kokotovic moved to the U.S. where he served as a professor at the University of Illinois until 1990. He then became a professor and director of the Center for Control Engineering and Computation at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Kokotovic’s work has focused on adaptive control, singular perturbation, and nonlinear control. In the 1960s he developed the sensitivity points method which is still in use for the automatic tuning of industrial controllers. Kokotovic is an IEEE Life Fellow and Reciepient of the IEEE Control Systems Award.