Brooks Butler is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Irvine, where he is a participant in the Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program administered by Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) through an interagency agreement between the U.S. Department of Energy and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University in 2024. He received his M.S. in Computer Science and his B.S. in Applied Physics from Brigham Young University in 2020 and 2019, respectively.

Anastasia Bizyaeva joined the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering faculty at Cornell University as an assistant professor in July 2024. Her research develops new design principles for flexible multi-agent autonomy inspired by the emergent properties of complex, collectively intelligent biological and socio-cognitive groups. Prior to joining Cornell, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the AI Institute in Dynamic Systems at the University of Washington. She received her Ph.D. in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University in September 2022 and her B.A. in physics with a minor in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2016.

M. Umar B. Niazi is an incoming assistant professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering in NYU Abu Dhabi. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher at the Division of Decision and Control Systems at KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden) and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA). He received his Ph.D. in automatic control engineering from Grenoble INP, Université Grenoble Alpes (France) in 2021, where he was affiliated with INRIA Grenoble and GIPSA-Lab as a graduate research assistant. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical and electronics engineering from COMSATS Institute of Information Technology (Pakistan) and Bilkent University (Turkey), respectively. Dr. Niazi is a recipient of the Marie-Curie postdoctoral fellowship from the European Commission. During his doctoral studies, he received a six-month grant from INRIA under the Mission COVID-19 framework. Both his bachelor's and master's degrees were fully funded by scholarships. He was a finalist for the Best Student Paper Award at the 2019 European Control Conference (ECC). Dr. Niazi serves as the Finance Chair of the NextCom committee for students and early career researchers in the IEEE Control Systems Society. 

Urmee Maitra is a PhD candidate attached to the Electrical Engineering department at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur. Currently, she is in her fifth year of her course. Prior to that she was attached to the Electrical Engineering department at Jadavpur University, India. To name a few, her research interests include game theory, spreading processes and optimal control. She has attended and presented her work in several international workshops and conferences. She is the finance co-chair (2025) of the IEEE CSS supported NextCom. She is also interested in playing chess, and in the past has represented her school and district in various chess competitions. 

Carina Veil is a postdoctoral researcher in the Living Matter Lab at Stanford University researching learning-enhanced control for soft bioinspired robots. Her research interests include applications and methods at the intersection of nature, medicine and control. She received a B.Sc in biomedical engineering, M.Sc. in engineering cybernetics, and Ph.D from the University of Stuttgart, Germany, in 2017, 2020, and 2023, respectively. For her Ph.D., she investigated impedance-based tissue differentiation for tumor detection. From 2023 to 2025, she has been a Postdoc at the Institute for System Dynamics, University of Stuttgart, Germany and head of their biomedical engineering research group investigating electrical sensors and computer vision methods to drive multi-sensor tissue differentiation in oncology forward. During this time, her research focus shifted to control theory. In 2024, she has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of California San Diego, USA, with Prof. Miroslav Krstić, where she worked on PDE control in the context of population dynamics, which serve rich scientific purposes in demography, ecology, epidemics, or biotech.

Tanushree Roy joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas Tech University as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2022. Her research goal is to build a resilient future for human-centric smart cities. The high‐level goal of such smart cities is to provide better value of services by optimally using the available resources, minimizing the operational cost, maximizing the safety and security, and improving quality of life. Her current research is focused on the resilience of socio-technical systems, such as smart transportation and energy storage systems. She combines control theoretic techniques, mathematical modeling, and machine learning to ensure the safety and the cybersecurity of such human-centric smart city infrastructures. Tanushree received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University in the year of 2022. Previously, she has also received the M.S. degree in Mathematics from University of Central Florida in 2015 and the M.E. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology (IIEST), Shibpur, India in 2011. Between 2011-13, she worked as a Research Consultant for Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur.

Rajul Kumar is a Presidential Scholar and PhD student at George Mason University, focusing on the intersection of non-linear control and human–robot interactions. He received his Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering from Delhi Technological University (formerly Delhi College of Engineering) in 2021. His research aims to advance control methodologies for safer, more intuitive human–robot collaboration, and he has actively contributed to initiatives that broaden engagement and opportunities within the engineering community.

Lucy Hodgins is a PhD student at the University of Southampton, researching control approaches for stroke rehabilitation using electrode arrays. She also creates and hosts the Coffee and Control podcast, which aims to highlight voices within the control community and inspire students to pursue a research career in control.

Luca Ballotta received the Master’s degree in automation engineering and the Ph.D. degree in information engineering from the University of Padova in 2019 and 2023, respectively. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Delft Center for Systems and Control (DCSC), Delft University of Technology. In 2020 and 2022, he was Visiting Student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was the recipient of the Young Author Prize at the 2020 IFAC World Congress and was also the Finalist of the 2024 EECI Ph.D. Award. His research interests include networked control of multi-agent and multi-robot systems under resource constraints, resilient distributed control, safe control, and control under sparsity constraints.

Saeed Ahmed is an Assistant Professor of Systems and Control at the University of Groningen, where he is affiliated with the Engineering and Technology Institute Groningen and the Jan C. Willems Center for Systems and Control. Prior to joining this position, he held research positions at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, the Technical University of Kaiserslautern (now RPTU), Germany, Bilkent University, Turkey, and CentraleSupélec, France. His research interests span various topics in systems and control engineering. From a theoretical point of view, he is interested in stability and control, online optimisation, observer design, nonlinear and hybrid (switched and impulsive) systems, networked systems, and time-delay systems. From an application point of view, he is interested in designing intelligent control algorithms for autonomous vehicles and district heating systems. He won several awards including the best presentation award in the Control, Robotics, Communications, Network category at the IEEE Graduate Research Conference 2018 held at Bilkent University, Turkey, and the Outstanding Reviewer Award by the European Journal of Control. He is an associate editor of Systems and Control Letters and IEEE CSS Technology Conference Editorial Board. He is a member of the IFAC Technical Committees on Non-linear Control Systems, Networked Systems, and Distributed Parameter Systems.

Baike She is a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He obtained his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Iowa. His current research focuses on the modeling, analysis, and control of network dynamics.

Tung Nguyen received a degree of engineering in automatic control from Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Vietnam, in 2018 and an M.Sc. degree in aerospace engineering from Sejong University, South Korea, in 2021. Currently, he is working toward a Ph.D. degree in automatic control with the Division of Systems and Control, Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University, Sweden. He was visiting scholars at the Kyushu University, Japan (2018), the University of Cyprus, Cyprus (2023), and the Lund University, Sweden (2024). His research interests include control theory, multi-agent systems, and cyber-physical security.

Armin Lederer received the B.Sc., M.Sc., and Dr. Ing. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, in 2015, 2018, and 2023, respectively. Since 2023, he is a postdoctoral researcher in the Learning and Adaptive Systems Group in the Department of Computer Science and associated researcher in the ETH AI Center at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He was finalist for the European Systems & Control PhD Thesis Award 2024, and has received the Chorafas Foundation Award and the Rohde & Schwarz PhD Thesis Award. His current research interests include the stability and safety of data-driven control systems and machine learning in closed-loop systems.

Runyu (Cathy) Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate (2019 - present) in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University. During the summer of 2022, she served as a research intern at Salesforce Research, working on multi-agent reinforcement learning. Prior to pursuing her Ph.D., she earned a B.S. degree in mathematics from Peking University in 2019. Her research interests lie in online control methods, reinforcement learning, game theory and optimization, with particular focus on multi-agent systems. She was selected as the EECS rising star in 2024, and was a finalist of the Two Sigma Diversity PhD Fellowship in 2022.

Yu Tang is a PhD student at Tandon School of Engineering in New York University. He received his B.Eng. degree and M.S. degree in Transportation Engineering from Tongji University in 2016 and 2019, respectively. He is interested in using ideas from stochastic processes and control theory to design resilient intelligent transportation systems.

Miguel Castroviejo-Fernandez received his B.Sc. and  M.A.Sc. in Aeronautical Engineering from the Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium, in 2019. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan.

His research interests are on constrained control and optimization.

Pio Ong received a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from UCSD in 2012 and an M.S. in Astronautical Engineering from USC in 2013. While working at SpaceX, he developed a strong interest in control theory, which led him to pursue a Ph.D. in Engineering Sciences (Aerospace Engineering) at UCSD. Under the guidance of Prof. Jorge Cortés, he completed his Ph.D. in 2022. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech, working with Prof. Aaron D. Ames. His research focuses on safety-critical control and event-triggered control for nonlinear and networked systems, with a particular interest in using control barrier functions (CBFs) to guarantee system safety in the presence of attacks or heavy resource constraints, with applications to autonomous and aerospace systems.

Abhishek Dhyani obtained his master’s degree with a specialization in control systems from the Indian Institute of Technology Mandi. Currently he is a PhD candidate at the Maritime and Transport Technology Department of the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), The Netherlands. As a part of the European project - AUTOBarge, his research involves ensuring a safe control and coordination of autonomous vessels by developing a fault diagnosis framework for the inland waterway interconnected systems. His research interests include the topics of Fault diagnosis, Fault-tolerant control, autonomous systems, and multi-agent control.

Leonardo Toso is a Presidential and CAIRFI (Center for AI and Responsible Financial Innovation) fellow and a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. Before joining Columbia, he was a research assistant in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford. He holds an M.S. degree in Control, Signal, and Image Processing from the University of Paris-Saclay and an M.Eng. degree in Electrical Engineering from CentraleSupélec. In addition, he also holds a B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Campinas (Unicamp).

Ahmet Kaan Aydin received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Yildiz Technical University (Turkiye) in 2020, and an M.Sc. degree in Mathematics from Western Kentucky University (USA) in 2022. Ahmet is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His research interests include controllability, and model reductions of smart material systems and development of efficient solvers for stochastic Navier-Stokes equations.

Philip E. Paré is the Rita Lane and Norma Fries Assistant Professor in the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2018, after which he went to KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden to be a Post-Doctoral Scholar. He received his B.S. in Mathematics with University Honors and his M.S. in Computer Science from Brigham Young University in 2012 and 2014, respectively. He was a recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 2023, a 2023-2024 Teaching for Tomorrow Fellow at Purdue, and an inaugural Societal Impact Fellow at Purdue in 2021 as well. He served as IEEE CSS Student Activity Chair (SAC) 2022-2023, IEEE CDC 2023 SAC, IEEE CDC 2024 SAC, the ACC 2026 Publicity Chair. He served as NextCom's Faculty Advisor in its first year and now serves as a member of the Steering Committee. His research focuses on networked control systems, namely modeling, analysis, and control of spreading processes over networks.

Kristina Miller is with the Air Force Research Laboratory. She graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering in August 2024. Her dissertation resides at the intersection of formal methods and control theory, focusing on developing methods for safe autonomy. Outside of research, she spends most of her time outdoors climbing, hiking, camping, or going on other adventures.

Erfaun Noorani is a Technical Staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. His research focuses on developing robust-resilient-adaptive reinforcement learning and data-driven control systems that are generic, provide performance guarantees, and can generalize-reason-improve in complex and unknown task environments. Before joining the Laboratory, he was a Postdoctoral Associate within the Institute for Systems Research (ISR) at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he received his Ph.D. and M.S. as a Clark Doctoral Fellow with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His doctoral work, under the supervision of John Baras, focused on robust and risk-sensitive reinforcement learning. Erfaun obtained a B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.