Background

René van Paassen obtained his M.Sc. in Aerospace Engineering from the Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, in 1988. At that same institution he received his Ph.D. with a thesis on the neuromuscular system of the pilot’s arm, in 1994. Subsequently, he spent two years as a Postdoctoral Fellow (Brite/EuRam Research Fellow) with the University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany, with Prof. Gunnar Johannsen, where he worked on the development of alternative interfaces for process control based on functional models of the process, and half a year with the Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark, where he worked with prof. Morten Lind on multilevel flow modeling in the RoHMI project. He returned to Delft in 1997, working on alarm management, modelling of harbor pilots (at Mechanical Engineering with Prof. Peter Wieringa), vestibular system modelling (TNO Soesterberg and Aerospace Engineering, Delft) and simulation architecture (SIMULTAAN project, Aerospace Engineering).

In 1998 he joined the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering as an assistant professor, and he is currently an associate professor there. He is chairman of the Aerospace Engineering Library Committee. Since 2008 he has served as an Associate Editor (’09-’10) and as Associate Editor in Chief (’11-’13) for the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, part A, and he is currently Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems (IEEE-THMS), with IEEE-SMC-A. With his students and team he twice won the best paper award in the AIAA Simulation and Modeling technologies (2004 and 2008), he won the 2007 Franklin V. Taylor Memorial Award for the best paper at the 2006 IEEE-SMC conference and an award for best associate editor for IEEE-SMC in 2014.