Dr. Ming Leu, the Keith and Pat Bailey Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering, who served as director of the Intelligent Systems Center (ISC) since 2003, stepped down as director on July 1. At Leu’s request, the ISC faculty nominated and then voted for a new interim director. Based on their recommendation, Dr. Donald C. Wunsch II has been named interim director of the Intelligent Systems Center.

Wunsch is the Mary Finley Missouri Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His appointment began July 3.

Wunsch’s key research contributions are real-time design of Unsupervised and Reinforcement Learning and their applications. He is an IEEE Fellow and previous International Neural Networks Society (INNS) president, INNS fellow, NSF CAREER award recipient, 2015 INNS Gabor Award recipient, and 2019 INNS Ada Lovelace Award recipient. He served as IJCNN general chair, and on several boards, including the St. Patrick’s School Board, Missouri S&T Newman Center Board, IEEE Neural Networks Council, INNS, and the University of Missouri Bioinformatics Consortium, and he chaired the Missouri S&T Information Technology and Computing Committee as well as the Student Design and Experiential Learning Center Board.