Professor Mike J. Grimble

Michael Grimble was born in Grimsby, England and served an electrical apprenticeship at CIBA Chemicals, attended Grimsby College of Technology and obtained a Higher National Certificate in Electrical Engineering. He then joined Associated Electrical Industries and undertook a sandwich course at Rugby College of Engineering Technology. He joined GEC Electrical Projects in Rugby where he obtained MSc and PhD degrees from the University of Birmingham. The PhD studies involved secondment from GEC to the Industrial Automation Group at Imperial College, working for Professor Greyham Bryant on the modelling and control of cold strip rolling mills. Whilst working for GEC as a Senior Engineer he took an Open University Degree studying mathematics. He joined Sheffield City Polytechnic (Sheffield Hallam University) in 1976, where he became a Reader in Control Engineering.

The University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, appointed him to the Professorship of Industrial Systems in 1981, and he established the Industrial Control Centre. The centre he established was concerned with general industrial control problems, including those arising in the Automotive, Aerospace, Process Control, Wind Energy, Metal Processing, Marine, Electrical Power, and Water industries. His research interests include nonlinear control and filtering, robust and predictive control, multivariable design, adaptive control, and optimal control and estimation theory.

He established a consultancy company, Industrial Systems and Control Ltd., in 1987 with university support, providing training and consulting services. He also developed what became known as the Applied Control Technology Consortium in 1990, an international technology transfer and training organisation with support from many companies in Europe and North America. This has helped companies adopt new technology over three decades. He was appointed a Research Professor at the University of Strathclyde from October 2010, and Deputy Chairman of ISC Limited from June 2010. The company was closed after almost 40 years (early 2026), and a slimmer ISC Consultants has since been established with more focused training and consulting objectives.

He is the Managing Editor of the Wiley journals he helped develop over four decades: International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control, the International Journal of Adaptive Control and Signal Processing, and Optimal Control Applications and Methods. He was more recently appointed editor of Advanced Control for Applications: Engineering and Industrial Systems.

He is a joint editor of the Springer Monograph Series on Advances in Industrial Control and the joint editor of the Springer textbook series on Control and Signal Processing. He was the editor of the Prentice Hall International series of books on Systems and Control Engineering and the Prentice-Hall series on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing. He was also an Editor of the Springer Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences series. He is a past Associate Editor of Automatica and has been Chairman of several IFAC and IEEE conferences over the last two decades.

He became a Fellow and Chartered Engineer for the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1974 and Fellow and Chartered Mathematician of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications in 1982. He became a founder member, and the first Chairman, of the IEEE Control Systems Society UK and Ireland Control Systems Chapter, in 1975. He became a Fellow of the Institute of Measurement and Control in 1990 and a member of the Institute of Directors in 1993.