Dr. Herschel C. Pangborn is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Aerospace Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University, and the Principal Investigator of the Pangborn Advanced Controls Lab. His research focuses on model predictive control, optimization, and set-based verification of dynamic systems, including electro-thermal systems in vehicles, buildings, and power grids.

He received the B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Penn State in 2013 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 2015 and 2019, respectively. During the second half of 2019, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Illinois. In 2020, he was an Air Force Research Lab Summer Faculty Fellow. He has also been a member of the software development team at CU Aerospace, supporting the Thermosys simulation toolset for modeling and analyzing the behavior of thermal management systems. He joined Penn State in January 2020.

Dr. Pangborn is a recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the University of Illinois MechSE Graduate Teaching Fellowship, the ASME Energy Systems Technical Committee Best Paper Award, the American Control Conference Best Paper Award, and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award. He was also been included on the University of Illinois List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students.

Outside of engineering, Dr. Pangborn enjoys training martial arts and playing music.