Rastko R. Selmic was born in Belgrade, Serbia in 1970. He was educated at the prestigious Mathematical Grammar School in Belgrade, University of Belgrade, Department of Electrical Engineering, and the University of Texas at Arlington, where he received his M.S. in 1997 and Ph.D. in 2000, both in Electrical Engineering. He is a licensed Professional Engineer (P.Eng.) of Ontario, Canada. His research interests are in the control of micro-aerial vehicles, formation control of multi-agents, gesture-based computing and control, failure detection in nonlinear systems, and neural networks.
He is currently a Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. He served as an Associate Chair of Graduate Studies at the ECE Department from 2019 to 2021. From 2014 to 2016 he was an AT&T Professor of Electrical Engineering at Louisiana Tech University, where he directed Intelligent Sensors and Actuators Laboratory and Micro-Aerial Vehicles and Sensor Networks (MAVSeN) Laboratory. From 2002 to 2014 he was an Assistant and Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Louisiana Tech University. He was an Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) Research Fellow during summer of 2007, 2008, and 2015. He was a lead DSP Engineer at Signalogic, Dallas, Texas (2000 — 2002), designing embedded hardware and software systems for different telecommunication and Internet applications. From 1995 to 2000 he was a graduate research assistant at University of Texas at Arlington Research Institute. He was a consultant for numerous companies.
Rastko Selmic was the recipient of a scholarship from Signalogic in 1996, ARRI Best Paper Award in 1997, Finalist for the Best Paper Award at IEEE International Conference on Control Applications in 1998, First prize at the IEEE Fort Worth, Texas Section Graduate Paper Contest in 1999, and UTARI Invention Award in 2000 for his patent. He was awarded the AT&T Professorship in Electrical Engineering in 2009 and the IfM Outstanding Publication Award for 2009.
He is the author/co-author of 4 book chapters, 90 journal and conference papers, and textbooks Neuro-Fuzzy Control of Industrial Systems with Actuator Nonlinearities (SIAM Press 2002) and Wireless Sensor Networks: Security, Coverage, and Localization (Springer 2016). He served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and currently serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics. He is a Senior member of IEEE and Sigma Xi.