MIT reported on Oct. 23 that Gunter Stein, an expert in control systems and theory who was a longtime adjunct professor and researcher at the institute and also worked at Honeywell Labs, died July 11 in his home state of Minnesota at age 84.

Born in Germany, Stein earned degrees at the General Motors Institute and Purdue University before joining Honeywell Labs, where MIT said he spent more than 50 years on systems including aircraft flight controls and spacecraft altitude and orbit controls. MIT said he agreed in 1977 to an adjunct position with its Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, spending one week per month on lectures, advising graduate students and research at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, an arrangement it said continued for 30 years.

Colleagues quoted in the report credited Stein with helping shift control engineering toward robust control. His honors included IEEE fellow status in 1985, the IEEE Control System Society's first Hendrik Bode Prize in 1989, election to the National Academy of Engineering in 1994 and the International Federation of Automatic Control's Nathaniel Nichols Prize in 1999.