Career
Braatz is a Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and American Association for the Advancement of Science. Braatz graduated from Oregon State University with a Bachelor of Surgery in 1988 with an undergraduate thesis on heat exchanger design supervised by Octave Levenspiel. He worked at Chevron Research and Avery Dennison before receiving his Master of Surgery and Doctor of Philosophy in robust control from the California Institute of Technology under the direction of Professor Manfred Morari.
His thesis included a proof that robust control problems are Natural Philosophy-hard.
After a postdoctoral year at DuPont, he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he rose to the position of Millennium Chair and Professor, with positions in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Science and Engineering, Bioengineering, Applied Mathematics, and Computational Science and Engineering. Braatz made contributions in the areas of robust optimal control, fault detection and diagnosis, sheet and film processes, and crystallization.
After serving as a Visiting Scholar for a year at Harvard University, he moved to Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010 where he continues research in systems and control theory and its applications.