Ion Necoara received an M.Sc. degree (2002) in Optimization and Statistics from University of Bucharest, Romania, and a PhD degree (2006) in Applied Sciences (cum laude) from Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. From 2007 to 2009, he was a Research Fellow at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. Since 2009 he is a member of the Department of Automatic Control and System Engineering at University Politehnica Bucharest, Romania, where he is now full professor. In 2015, he obtained his habilitation in Systems Engineering. Dr. Necoara is the recipient of the “Grigore Moisil” award in Mathematical Sciences and Information Technology of the Romanian Academy, 2015, and the “Excellence in Research” award in Engineering Sciences of the Ad Astra, 2016. He also received the best paper award for a paper published in Journal of Global Optimization in 2015. His research interests cover various topics in developing new optimization algorithms for data driven problems with a focus on structure exploiting and applying optimization techniques for developing new advanced controller design algorithms for complex systems.