Speakers

Samuel Coogan is an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Prior to joining Georgia Tech in 2017, he was an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles from 2015 to 2017. He received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. His research is in the area of dynamical systems and autonomy and focuses on developing scalable tools for verification and control of networked, cyber-physical systems. He received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2018, a Young Investigator Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research in 2019, and the Donald P Eckman Award from the American Automatic Control Council in 2020.

Jun Liu is a Professor of Applied Mathematics and a Canada Research Chair at the University of Waterloo, where he directs the Hybrid Systems Lab. He received his B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Shanghai Jiao-Tong University, M.S. in Mathematics from Peking University, and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Waterloo. After a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Caltech, he was a Lecturer at the University of Sheffield before joining Waterloo in 2015. His research focuses on hybrid systems, control theory, optimization, and machine learning, with applications in robotics and cyber-physical systems. He has received a Marie-Curie Career Integration Grant, a Canada Research Chair (2017–2027), an Ontario Early Researcher Award, and the CAIMS/PIMS Early Career Award. His best paper awards include the Zhang Si-Ying Outstanding Youth Paper Award and the IFAC Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems (NAHS) Paper Prize. Dr. Liu is a senior member of IEEE, a member of SIAM, and a lifetime member of CAIMS, and has served on editorial boards and program committees of several journals and conferences in control and systems theory.

Dr. Claus Danielson is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of New Mexico. He received his Doctorate in 2014 from the Model Predictive Control Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a Master's degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Washington. Prior to joining the University of New Mexico, he served as a Principal Research Scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in Cambridge, MA. Dr. Danielson's research interests are motion planning and constrained control. He has applied his research to a variety of fields including autonomous vehicles, robotics, spacecraft guidance and control, heating ventilation and air conditioning, energy storage networks, adaptive optics, atomic force microscopy, and cancer treatment. 

Professor Ilya V. Kolmanovsky has received his Ph.D. degree in Aerospace Engineering in 1995, his M.S. degree in Aerospace Engineering in 1993 and his M.A. degree in Mathematics in 1995, all from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is presently a Pierre T. Kabamba Collegiate Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan. Professor Kolmanovsky’s research interests are in control theory for systems with state and control constraints, and in control applications to aerospace and automotive systems.  Before joining the University of Michigan in January 2010, he was with Ford Research and Advanced Engineering in Dearborn, Michigan for close to 15 years. He is a Fellow of IEEE, IFAC and U.S. National Academy of Inventors, an Associate Fellow of AIAA, a past recipient of the Donald P. Eckman Award of American Automatic Control Council, of 2002 and 2016 IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology Outstanding Paper Awards, of SICE Technology Award, of several technical achievement, innovation and publication awards of Ford Research and Advanced Engineering,  of Huebner research excellence award from the University of Michigan, and of 2025 AIAA Mechanics and Control of Flight Award.  His publication record includes over 250 journal articles, over 500 conference papers, over 20 book chapters, 4 edited books, as well as 105 United States patents.  He presently serves as the Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology.

Melanie Zeilinger is an Associate Professor at the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering at ETH Zurich, where she is leading the Intelligent Control Systems group at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control. She received the diploma in Engineering Cybernetics from the University of Stuttgart in Germany in 2006 and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from ETH Zurich in 2011. From 2011 to 2012 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. From 2012 to 2015 she was a Postdoctoral Researcher and Marie Curie fellow in a joint program with the University of California at Berkeley, USA, and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tuebingen, Germany. From 2018 to 2019 she was a professor at the University of Freiburg, Germany. was a Postdoctoral Researcher and Marie Curie fellow in a joint program with the University of California at Berkeley, USA, and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tuebingen, Germany. From 2018 to 2019 she was a professor at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Her awards include the ETH medal for her PhD thesis, an SNF Professorship, the ETH Golden Owl for exceptional teaching 2022 and the European Control Award 2023. She is one of the co-founders of the new Conference on Learning for Dynamics and Control (L4DC). Her research interests include learning-based control with applications to robotics and human-in-the-loop control.