Jerry M. Mendel received the B.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 1959, an MS in Electrical Engineering in 1960 and a Ph. D. in Electrical Engineering in 1963, all from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, Brooklyn, NY. He spent 11 years in the aerospace industry working for McDonnell Douglas in the field of control theory. He then spent 44 years at the University of Southern California (USC), and retired at the beginning of 2018. He is now Emeritus Professor of Electrical Engineering at USC.

At McDonnell Douglas he worked on problems in state estimation, optimal control, adaptive control, learning control, system identification and artificial intelligence for control. At USC, he worked in the following fields: Model-based signal processing for exploration seismology; higher-order statistics for processing non-Gaussian data; petroleum reservoir signal processing using fuzzy logic and Extended Kalman filtering techniques; type-1 fuzzy sets and systems; type-2 fuzzy sets and systems; perceptual computing; computing with words; and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis.

He has published close to 600 technical papers and is author and/or co-author of 12 books, including: Uncertain Rule-based Fuzzy Logic Systems: Introduction and New Directions (Prentice-Hall, 2001), Perceptual Computing: Aiding People in Making Subjective Judgments (Wiley & IEEE Press, 2010), Introduction to Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Control: Theory and Application (Wiley & IEEE Press, 2014), and Uncertain Rule-based Fuzzy Systems: Introduction and New Directions, 2nd ed. (Springer, 2017).

According to Google Scholar (as of August 27, 2019) he has 50,349 citations, an h-index of 92 and an i10-index of 296.

He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, a Distinguished Member of the IEEE Control Systems Society, and a Fellow of the International Fuzzy Systems Association. Among his past many professional activities are: President of the IEEE Control Systems Society in 1986, Member of the Administrative Committee of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society for nine years, and, Chairman of its Fuzzy Systems Technical Committee and the Computing With Words Task Force of that technical committee.

His present research interests include: type-2 fuzzy logic systems and computing with words. He is especially interested in understanding why type-1 fuzzy systems can outperform non-fuzzy systems, why interval type-2 fuzzy systems can outperform type-1 fuzzy systems, why general type-2 fuzzy systems can outperform interval type-2 fuzzy systems, etc. His recent works on sculpting the state space provides novel answers to these questions.

• 1983 Best IEEE Transactions Paper Award of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society
• 1992 IEEE Signal Processing Society Outstanding Paper Award
• 2002 and 2014 IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems Outstanding Paper Awards
• 1984 IEEE Centennial Medal; IEEE Third Millenium Medal
• Fuzzy Systems Pioneer Award (2008) from the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society for “fundamental theoretical contributions and seminal results in fuzzy systems”
• 2015 USC Viterbi School of Engineering Senior Research Award.