Umar Iqbal (Senior Member, IEEE) is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and founding faculty member of Illinois State University's College of Engineering. His research addresses a central challenge in autonomy: keeping intelligent vehicles and robots reliable when GNSS or individual sensors are degraded or unavailable. His contributions include nonlinear error modeling for low-cost MEMS inertial/GNSS navigation, radar-aided navigation for GNSS-denied driving, FPGA-based real-time embedded navigation, safe-landing-zone identification from airborne LiDAR, and super-resolution DOA estimation for RIS-aided localization. His current work targets integrity-aware estimation of state and sensor credibility. He has authored 50+ peer-reviewed publications and contributed in Co-PI, faculty-advisor, and co-investigator roles to NSF-, DOE/Argonne-, and OSF HealthCare-supported programs totaling about $3 million. He previously served at Mississippi State, the University of Ottawa, Queen's University, and the Royal Military College of Canada. He is Associate Editor of the Canadian Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Academic Editor of the Journal of Advanced Transportation, and Guest Editor of special issues in Sensors and Advanced Devices & Instrumentation. He was inducted into the Mississippi State University Academy of Distinguished Teachers (2024). He holds a Ph.D. from Queen's University (2012) and is a licensed Professional Engineer.