Research Professor Mike Grimble founded Strathclyde’s Industrial Control Centre (ICC) in 1981, on his appointment as Professor of Industrial Systems within the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering. The ICC he built became a significant international name in industrial and robust control — and, from 1988 onward, the home from which today’s Wind Energy and Control (WEC) Group eventually grew.

His research addresses the design and analysis of industrial control systems, spanning robust control, nonlinear control and optimal control applications. He has authored and edited a series of widely-used textbooks in the field, including Robust Industrial Control Systems, Industrial Control Systems Design and Nonlinear Industrial Control Systems, and co-edited Springer’s long-running Advances in Industrial Control book series.

Professor Grimble has served as Managing Editor across several Wiley control journals, including Optimal Control Applications and Methods and Advanced Control for Applications, and holds fellowships as FIEEE, FIEE, FInstMC and FIMA. He also co-founded Industrial Systems and Control Ltd, a Strathclyde spin-out company that remains active decades later — a rare example of academic control research translating directly into sustained commercial practice.

Now a Research Professor at Strathclyde, he continues to contribute to the department’s control engineering research, and remains an important link between WEC’s applied, industry-facing approach to wind energy and the industrial control tradition it grew out of.

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Key expertise

• Robust and nonlinear industrial control system design
• Optimal control theory and applications
• Control engineering textbook authorship and journal editorship
• Translating control research into industrial and commercial practice

Professor Grimble’s founding of the Industrial Control Centre in 1981 laid the control engineering foundations that WEC continues to build on more than four decades later.