Early Stage Researchers (ESRs)
Ramin Abbasi
Ramin Abbasi graduated from KU Leuven as a mechanical engineer with a focus on systems and control theory in 2017. His interest in mathematical optimization led him to research in the field of optimal control theory. His thesis focused on an optimal co-design of controllers...
Jean Pierre Allamaa
Jean Pierre Allamaa is a Lebanese student who graduated with a Masters in Mechanical Engineering with a specialization in mechatronics and control from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland (EPFL) in 2020. His master thesis was about development and...
Leonardo Cecchin
Leonardo Cecchin graduated in Automation and Control Engineering at Politecnico di Milano in October 2020, with the thesis "Graph-Based Exploration and Mapping for Mobile Robots". From November 2020 until June 2021 he has been a Research Fellow at SAS-Lab, working on graph-based...
Lahcen El Bourkhissi
Lahcen El Bourkhissi was born in Morocco in 1997. After completing the high school studies, he entered the preparatory classes for engineering schools, an intensive program to enter the engineering schools in Morocco. Then, he joined the engineering program at the Hassania High School of Public Works...
Andrea Ghezzi
Andrea Ghezzi was born in Bergamo, Italy, in 1996. He obtained his Master degree cum laude in Automation and Control Engineering from Politecnico di Milano with a thesis about stochastic MPC with constraint prioritization. From December 2020 to September 2021 he was a researcher at...
Nicolas Kessler
Nicolas Kessler graduated in mechatronics at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in 2021 with focus on software engineering and control theory. Originally born in Germany, he also lived in France and China. During his studies he participated at Kamaro Engineering e. V. working on modular field robots. His...
Kristoffer Løwenstein
Kristoffer Løwenstein graduated from Aarhus University with a degree in mechanical engineering in January 2021. He worked with soft robotics in his thesis. His major research interests lie within dynamics, robotics, controls, artificial Intelligence, and the interplay between these fields...
Rudolf Reiter
Rudolf Reiter graduated 2016 with a Master’s degree in electrical engineering with a focus on control systems from the Graz University of Technology in Austria. During that time he did internships at Bernecker & Rainer (ABB) and an exchange semester at the University of Utah, USA. Afterwards, he joined...
Léo Simpson
Leo Simpson was born Toulouse, France, in 1996. After studying scientific topics during two years of "Classe Préparatoire", he studied at Ecole Polytechnique from 2016 to 2019, for a master of applied mathematics. During these studies, he has been focusing on mathematics, and more, in...
Renzi Wang
Renzi Wang received her bachelor’s degree in mechatronics with a focus on robotics from Harbin Institute of Technology, China, in 2018, and her master’s degree in mechatronics
with a focus on control theory from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, in 2021. During her master's study, she took...
Jing Xie
Jing Xie graduated with a Master’s Degree in electrical engineering with a focus on automation and robotics at Technical University of Munich. He did an internship at Robert Bosch on in-car monitoring system using machine learning methods in Hildesheim. His Master thesis was on...
Shaohui Yang
Shaohui Yang was born in Beijing, China in 1997. He obtained B.Eng. degree in computer science from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong SAR, China in 2019, and will be graduating with M.S. degree in Systems, Control and Robotics...
Shuhao Zhang
Shuhao Zhang obtained the B.S. degree in electromechanical engineering from the University of Macau in 2018, and the M.E. degree in mechatronics from the University of Melbourne in 2020. His master thesis focused on optimization-based collision avoidance and nonlinear model predictive...
Yuan Zhang
Yuan Zhang received the B.Eng degree in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2017, and the M.S.c degree in Machine Learning at University College London in 2018. After graduation, he come back to China and started to work on applying reinforcement learning in Natural...
Scientific advisors
The supervisors of ELO-X PhD projects are researchers in academia and industry focusing on optimization and learning approaches to solve complex engineering problems in industrial systems.
They constitute the Supervisory Board that will steer the 4-years-long training network.
Prof. Dr. Moritz Diehl
Moritz Diehl was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1971. He studied physics and mathematics at Heidelberg and Cambridge University from 1993-1999, and received his Ph.D. degree from Heidelberg University in 2001, at the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing. From...
Dr. Jonas Asprion
Jonas Asprion was born near Zurich, Switzerland, in 1984. After studying mechanical engineering with focus on control systems at ETH Zurich, he stayed with ETH and received his Ph.D. in 2013. He then worked for CNH Industrial as control-systems engineer in the Advanced...
Dr. Daniele Bernardini
Daniele Bernardini was born in Siena, Italy, in 1982. He received his master’s degree in Computer Engineering in 2007 and his Ph.D. in Information Engineering in 2011 from the University of Siena, Italy, specializing in automatic controls. From 2011 to 2015, he was with IMT Lucca as...
Prof. Dr. Lorenzo Fagiano
Lorenzo Fagiano received the Ph.D. degree in Information and Systems Engineering in 2009 from Politecnico di Torino, Italy. From 2010 to 2013 he held positions as Marie Curie Fellow at UC Santa Barbara, and ETH Zurich. From 2013 to 2016 he was scientist and senior scientist at ABB...
Dr. Stefan Gering
Stefan Gering studied Electrical Engineering with focus on automation and control at Technical University of Darmstadt, where he received his diploma in 2012. He continued his studies at the Institute for Automatic Control and Mechatronics in Darmstadt and as visiting researcher...
Prof. Dr. Ion Necoara
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...
Prof. Dr. Colin Jones
Colin Jones received a bachelor and master degree in electrical engineering and mathematics from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada and a Ph.D. degree in 2005 from the University of Cambridge, U.K, for his work on polyhedral computational methods for constrained...
Dr. Kasper Masschaele
Kasper Masschaele is Engineering Manager Software Engineering at Atlas Copco Airpower (Antwerp). After finishing a PhD in Chemical Engineering at KULeuven, he worked for 3 years as a PostDoc on the design and development of a reactor for Artificial Synthesis before joining...
Prof. Dr. Panos Patrinos
Panagiotis (Panos) Patrinos is currently associate professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT) of KU Leuven, Belgium. In 2014 he was a visiting professor at Stanford University. He received his PhD in Control and Optimization, M.S. in Applied Mathematics and...
Prof. Riccardo Scattolini
Riccardo Scattolini was born in Milano, Italy, in 1956. He is Full Professor of Automatic Control at the Politecnico di Milano. During the academic year 1984/85 he was a visiting researcher at the Oxford University. He has also spent one year working in industry on the simulation and control...
Prof. Dr. Jan Swevers
Jan Swevers was born in Leuven, Belgium, in 1963. He M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering and the Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from the KU Leuven, Belgium, in 1986 and 1992, respectively. He is full professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering...
Dr. Son Tong
Son Tong is a senior research engineer and project manager at Siemens Digital Industries Software in Leuven, Belgium. He is currently managing a R&D team of industrial PhDs and research engineers working on control and autonomous driving engineering topics. Son Tong was born in Thanh Hoa, and...
Prof. Dr. Melanie Zeilinger
Melanie Zeilinger is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering at ETH Zurich, Switzerland where she leads the Intelligent Control Systems group. She received the Diploma degree in engineering cybernetics from the University of Stuttgart, Germany, in 2006, and...