Tamer Başar received his B.S.E.E. from Robert College, Istanbul, and M.S., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in engineering and applied science from Yale University. After positions at Harvard University, the Marmara Research Institute (Gebze, Turkey), and Boğaziçi University (Istanbul), he joined the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1981, where he is currently Swanlund Endowed Chair Emeritus; CAS Professor Emeritus of ECE; and Research Professor at CSL and ITI. At Illinois, he has served as Director of the Center for Advanced Study (2014–2020), Interim Dean of Engineering (2018), and Interim Director of the Beckman Institute (2008–2010). He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a Fellow of IEEE, IFAC, SIAM, and AAAI. He has served as President of the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS), Founding President of the International Society of Dynamic Games (ISDG), and President of the American Automatic Control Council (AACC).

Over the years, he has received several awards and recognitions, including the IEEE CSS Bode Lecture Prize (2004), IFAC’s Quazza Medal (2005), AACC’s Bellman Control Heritage Award (2006), ISDG’s Isaacs Award (2010), the IEEE Control Systems Technical Field Award (2014), the Medal of Science of Turkey (1993), the IEEE Millennium Medal (2000), and the Wilbur Cross Medal from his alma mater Yale University (2021). He has also received honorary doctorates and professorships from several international institutions, including KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm); Tsinghua, Shandong, and Northeastern Universities (China); Boğaziçi and Doğuş Universities (Istanbul); and the NAS of Azerbaijan. He served as Editor-in-Chief of the IFAC Journal Automatica from 2004 to 2014 and is currently an editor for several book series. He has made substantial contributions to the fields of systems, control, communications, optimization, networks, and dynamic games, and is ranked sixth in the world by ScholarGPS for lifetime contributions to Game Theory.

His current research interests include stochastic teams, games, and networks (with finite- and infinite-population models); multi-agent systems and learning; data-driven distributed optimization; epidemic modeling and control over networks; strategic information transmission, the spread of disinformation, and deception; security and trust; energy systems; and cyber-physical systems.