Cristiana Punzo

PhD student

Short Bio

Cristiana Punzo is currently a Ph.D. student in Modeling and Engineering Risk and Complexity at Scuola Superiore Meridionale.

She graduated in Automation and Robotics Engineering in 2025 at the University of Naples Federico II, with a thesis on "Distributed Control for Multi-Agent Shepherding in the Presence of Obstacles" under the supervision of Prof. Mario di Bernardo.

Her main research interests lie in multi-agent systems, swarm robotics, reinforcement learning, safety-critical control, and density-based control methods. Her Ph.D. project, titled “Safe and Scalable Control of Robot Swarms via Learning-Control Integration and Multi-scale Control Methods,” aims to design hybrid learning-control architectures that combine decentralised decision-making, Control Barrier Functions, mean-field and density-based models, and optimal transport tools to enable safe, adaptive, and scalable coordination in large robotic swarms. The project is supervised by Prof. Mario di Bernardo (University of Naples Federico II), Prof. Giovanni Russo (University of Salerno), and Dr. Cinzia Tomaselli (Scuola Superiore Meridionale).

Publications