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Biography (third person)
Biography (third person)
M. Umar B. Niazi is a researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden). Prior to that, he held postdoctoral positions at MIT (USA) and KTH. 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. He was nominated as a full member of Sigma Xi in 2025. 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 funded by national and TUBITAK 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. He also served as a mentor in the Fatima Al-Fihri Predoctoral Fellowship program, supporting students from underrepresented backgrounds.
A photographic odyssey
A photographic odyssey
NextCom's Early Career Lunch at CDC Milan was a hit! The room was buzzing with conversation and connection. Left to right: Brooks Butler, Anastasia Bizyaeva, and Philip Pare. UN photobombing at the back.
Enjoying dinner while the city still glows with daylight. Stockholm summers are truly something special. Left to right: Keith Paarporn, Thinh Doan, UN, Brooks Butler, and Philip Brown.
Enjoying long summer days in Stockholm with my incredible friends and collaborators, Amr Alanwar and Michelle Chong, at ECC 2024.
Honored to share a moment with two giants in control systems, my mentor Munther Dahleh and the brilliant Jeff Shamma, after a delightful banquet at the ECC 2024 welcome reception. The stunning Stockholm City Hall, home to the annual Nobel Prize banquet, provided a truly unforgettable backdrop.
Reuniting with Friends at the CDC Milan. From left to Right: Angela Fontan, Apostolos Rikos, UN, Zhiqi Tang.
With Mohamed Abdalmoaty and Yassir Jedra in front of Stata Center at MIT
A perfect sendoff from my friends at LIDS MIT
I co-organized the Stockholm Workshop on the Emerging Topics in Systems and Control at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in June 2022.
I joined the group of Karl Johansson (Kalle) at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in September 2021. Kalle is arguably the best mentor I ever had. At KTH, I made awesome friends: Amr Alanwar, Nicola Bastianello, Amritam Das, Angela Fontan, Sebin Gracy, and Apostolos Rikos.
EECI 2018 course Game Theory and Distributed Control by Jeff Shamma at CentraleSupélec. Jeff is an awesome teacher. Ask Jeff a question, get a profound proverb before the answer. That's his superpower.
EECI 2021 course Equivariant Observers: Applications to Autonomous Systems by Robert Mahony, Jochen Trumpf, and Tarek Hamel at CentraleSupélec.
Diploma in hand, June 2022 at UGA marked the end of my Ph.D. journey, but the real celebration was catching up with amazing friends – Martin, Elena, and Tomasso – after we moved to Stockholm!
The NeCS team was among the organizers of CDC 2019 at Nice. I was there only for the food and drinks.
Annual team dinner of NeCS, summer of 2019, at Le Tonneau de Diogène, Saint-Ismier.
Christmas team dinner of NeCS, winter of 2019, at Restaurant Le Fantin Latour, Grenoble.
Christmas team dinner of NeCS, winter of 2018, at Restaurant Le Fantin Latour, Grenoble.
K fée des jeux, roughly translated as a cafe of fairy games, where you can play thousands of board games. The favorite place of Stephane (1st from right) and Martin (3rd from right).
La Ferme à Dédé, the best affordable French restaurant according to Diego (the selfie guy), and I agree with him. Feel free to interpret the stuff in the background as a metaphor for...something.
Hiking on Dent de Crolles mountain with Diego and Stephane.
Long hike to Lac du Lauvitel.
Paragliding in Ölüdeniz with a stupid pose and a *motorbike helmet.
Ölüdeniz Beach, a cradle of serenity with its impossibly blue water, became my sanctuary during my time in Turkey.
My time in Turkey was a spice bazaar for friendships. I started with a shopping list of acquaintances and walked out with a treasure trove of lifelong connections.
(Left) In Akçakoca with Prof. Yavuz Oruç (2nd from the left - an awesome teacher, folk singer, bağlama player, and photographer). An instance from a long road trip in northern Turkey some months after the engagement of Gökçe & Altuğ (1st and 2nd from the right). Black sea in the back.
(Middle) In Eğirdir, enjoying a Turkish breakfast - a secret to Turkish muscles, which, according to Altuğ, refers to the impressive number of folds in a well-rounded belly. Lake Eğirdir in the back.
(Right) I won a silver medal in a squash tournament in 2017 at Bilkent University after losing the final to Anjum (not in the photo), who learned to play squash from me a couple of months before the tournament. If nothing, it nonetheless proves that I am quite a good teacher.
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