Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Dr. Donald C. Wunsch

Dr. Donald C. Wunsch II is the Mary Finley Missouri Distinguished Professor and the inaugural Director, Kummer Institute Center for Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems at Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T). He is also Director of the Applied Computational Intelligence Laboratory. Earlier employers were: Texas Tech University, Boeing, Rockwell International and International Laser Systems. His education includes: Ph.D., Electrical Engineering - University of Washington (Seattle), Executive MBA - Washington University in St. Louis, M.S., Applied Mathematics - University of Washington (Seattle), B.S., Applied Mathematics - University of New Mexico (Albuquerque), and Jesuit Core Honors Program, Seattle University. He also completed the Kellogg Executive Scholar graduate certificate program in Nonprofit Management at Northwestern University. 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 Awardee, and recipient of the 2015 INNS Gabor Award, 2019 INNS Ada Lovelace Service Award, and 2023 IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award. 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, chaired the Missouri S&T Information Technology and Computing Committee as well as the Student Design and Experiential Learning Center Board. He served as Interim Director of the Missouri S&T Intelligent Systems Center and as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation. He has produced 23 Ph.D. recipients in Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Systems Engineering and Computer Science.