The Speakers

Andreas Malikopoulos is a Professor in the School of Civil & Environmental Engineering and the Director of the Information and Decision Science Lab at Cornell University. Prior to these appointments, he was the Terri Connor Kelly and John Kelly Career Development Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering (2017-2023) and the founding Director of the Sociotechnical Systems Center (2019-2023) at the University of Delaware (UD). Before he joined UD, he was the Alvin M. Weinberg Fellow (2010-2017) in the Energy & Transportation Science Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the Deputy Director of the Urban Dynamics Institute (2014-2017) at ORNL, and a Senior Researcher in General Motors Global Research & Development (2008-2010). He received a Diploma from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2004 and 2008, respectively, all in Mechanical Engineering. His research interests span several fields, including analysis, optimization, and control of cyber-physical systems; decentralized stochastic systems; stochastic scheduling and resource allocation; and learning in complex systems. Dr. Malikopoulos is the recipient of several prizes and awards, including the 2007 Dare to Dream Opportunity Grant from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, the 2007 University of Michigan Teaching Fellow, the 2010 Alvin M. Weinberg Fellowship, the 2019 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Young Researcher Award, and the 2020 UDs College of Engineering Outstanding Junior Faculty Award. He has been selected by the National Academy of Engineering to participate in the 2010 German-American Frontiers of Engineering (FOE) Symposium and organize a session on transportation at the 2016 European-American FOE Symposium. He has also been selected as a 2012 Kavli Frontiers of Science Scholar by the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Malikopoulos has been an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems from 2017 through 2020. He is an Associate Editor of Automatica and IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and a Senior Editor of IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a Fellow of the ASME, and a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society.

Gioele Zardini is an incoming faculty at MIT in Fall 2024, and currently a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University. He received his BSc., MSc., and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering with a focus on Robotics, Systems, and Control from ETH Zurich in 2017, 2019, and 2023 respectively. He spent time in Singapore as a researcher at nuTonomy (then Aptiv, now Motional), at Stanford University (working with Marco Pavone) and at MIT (in 2020 working with David Spivak, and in 2023 with Munther Dahleh). Driven by societal challenges, the goal of his research is to develop efficient computational tools and algorithmic approaches to formulate and solve complex, interconnected system design and autonomous decision making problems. His research interests include the codesign of sociotechnical systems, compositionality in engineering, applied category theory, decision and control, optimization, and game theory, with applications to intelligent transportation systems, autonomy, and complex networks and infrastructures. He is the creator of Autonomy Talks (an International seminar series promoting a diverse research exchange on autonomy), as well as a lead organizer for the seminal workshops Compositional Robotics: Mathematics and Tools, and Co-Design and Coordination of Future Mobility Systems at IEEE ICRA and ITSC, respectively. He is the recipient of a paper award at the 4th Applied Category Theory Conference, the Best Paper Award (1st Place) at the 24th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), DoE, and Amazon awards.

Maria Laura Delle Monache is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she was a research scientist at Inria in Grenoble, France (2016- 2021) and a Postdoctoral fellow at Rutgers University - Camden in USA (2014-2016). She received the Ph.D. degree in applied mathematics from the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, France in 2014. She is a member of the IEEE CSS Technical Committee on smart cities and of the Standing Committee on Traffic Flow Theory and Characteristics of the Transportation Research Board (NASEM). She is the recipient of the 2023 IEEE TCCPS Mid-career award and the 2023 IEEE ITSS Young researcher/Engineer award. Dr. Delle Monaches research lies at the intersection of transportation engineering, mathematics, and control theory.