Speakers

Eduardo Sontag

Eduardo D. Sontag received his Licenciado in Mathematics at the University of Buenos Aires (1972) and a Ph.D. in Mathematics (1977) under Rudolf E. Kalman at the University of Florida. From 1977 to 2017, at Rutgers University he was Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and in the Graduate Faculty of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering, and in the Cancer Institute of NJ. He directed the undergraduate Biomathematics Interdisciplinary Major and the Center for Quantitative Biology, and was Graduate Director at the Institute for Quantitative Biomedicine. In January 2018, Dr. Sontag became a University Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and of BioEngineering at Northeastern University, and is affiliated with the Mathematics and Chemical Engineering departments. Since 2006, he has been a Research Affiliate at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, MIT, and since 2018 a the Faculty Member in the Program in Therapeutic Science at Harvard Medical School.

Sontag is a Fellow of IEEE, AMS, SIAM, and IFAC. Awards include: Reid Prize in Mathematics (2001), Hendrik W. Bode Lecture Prize (2002), IEEE Control Systems Field Award (2011), Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award (2022), IFAC Triennial Award on Nonlinear Control (2023), and from Rutgers the Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Research (2002) and the 2005 Teacher/Scholar Award (2005). In 2024 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2025 to the US National Academy of Sciences. [Website]

Sandra Hirche

Sandra Hirche holds the TUM Liesel Beckmann Distinguished Professorship and heads the Chair of Information-oriented Control in the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany (since 2013). She received the diploma engineer degree in Aeronautical and Aerospace Engineering in 2002 from the Technical University Berlin, Germany, and the Doctor of Engineering degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2005 from the Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany. From 2005-2007 she has been a PostDoc Fellow of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science at the Fujita Laboratory at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan. Prior to her present appointment she has been an Associate Professor at TUM.

Her main research interests include learning, cooperative, and networked control with applications in human-robot interaction, multi-robot systems, and general robotics. She has published more than 200 papers in international journals, books and refereed conferences. She has received multiple awards such as the IFAC World Congress Best Poster Award in 2005 and – together with students – several best paper awards including the Outstanding Student Paper Award of the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control 2018. In 2013 she has been awarded with an ERC Starting Grant on the “Control based on Human Models” and in 2019 with the ERC Consolidator Grant on “Safe data-driven control for human-centric systems”.

Sandra Hirche is Fellow of the IEEE. She received the IEEE CSS Distinguished Member Award in 2021. She has served as IEEE Control System Society (CSS) Vice-President for Member Activities (2014/15), as Chair for Student Activities in the IEEE CSS (2009-2014), as Chair of the CSS Awards Subcommittee on “CDC Best Student-Paper Award” (2010-2014), and has been elected member of the Board of Governors of IEEE CSS (2010-2013). Furthermore she has been Co-Chair of the IFAC TC 1.5 “Networked Control Systems” (2010-2017) and IPC Co-Chair of the IFAC World Congress 2020. [Website]

Thomas Beckers

Thomas Beckers is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and the Institute for Software Integrated Systems at Vanderbilt University. Before joining Vanderbilt, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, where he was member of the GRASP Lab, PRECISE Center and ASSET Center. In 2020, he earned his doctorate in Electrical Engineering at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany. He received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering in 2010 and 2013, respectively, from the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany. In 2018, he was a visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.

He is a DAAD AInet fellow and was awarded with the Rhode & Schwarz Outstanding Dissertation prize. His research interests include physics-enhanced learning, nonparametric models, and safe learning-based control. [Website]

Ján Drgoňa

Jan is an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering and the Ralph S. O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute (ROSEI) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU). Before joining JHU, Jan was a senior data scientist in the Physics and Computational Sciences Division at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and a postdoc at the mechanical engineering department at KU Leuven in Belgium. Jan has a PhD in Control Engineering from the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Slovakia. His current research is focused on scientific machine learning with applications in sustainable energy systems. [Website]

Rolf Findeisen

Rolf Findeisen studied engineering cybernetics at the University of Stuttgart and chemical engineering at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. He began his doctoral studies at ETH Zurich's, which he completed in 2004 following his doctoral father to the University of Stuttgart. 2007, Rolf was appointed professor at the Institute of Automatic Control at Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg. Since August 2021, he heads the Control and Cyber-physical Systems Laboratory at the Technical University of Darmstadt.

Rolf is engaged in method development in the area of systems theory and control engineering, focusing on optimization-based and predictive control; fusing machine learning approaches such as Gaussian processes and neural networks with model based control providing guarantees; and control of complex, distributed systems via communication networks. [Website]

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