Bio and CV

Education

I received the Ph.D. degree in Systems and Control from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands in 2020, under supervision of Professor Kanat Camlibel and Professor Pietro Tesi. Before this, I obtained the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Applied Mathematics from the same university, in 2014 and 2016 respectively. My Master's thesis project was supervised by Professor Harry Trentelman and Professor Kanat Camlibel.

Work

I am an assistant professor at the University of Groningen, where I work in the Systems, Control and Optimization group within the Bernoulli Institute. I am a member of the Centre for Data Science and Systems Complexity and the Jan C. Willems Center for Systems and Control.

Before this, I held postdoctoral research positions. During 2020-2021 I was a postdoc at Cambridge University, UK, working with Professor Rodolphe Sepulchre. In the last three months of 2021, I was a short-term postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zürich, Switzerland, where I worked in the group of Professor Florian Dörfler. During 2019-2020 I was a visiting researcher at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, where I worked under the supervision of Professor Mehran Mesbahi.

My research interests lie in the field of systems and control. I aim to develop a systems and control theory that is grounded on measured data. Some of the topics I work on are data-driven control, system identification and experiment design with applications to networked systems and neuroscience. I am also interested in connections to machine learning, especially through the concept of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces.

I am a recipient of the 2021 IEEE Control Systems Letters Outstanding Paper Award for this paper on Willems’ lemma, coauthored with Claudio De Persis, Kanat Camlibel and Pietro Tesi. I received the Ph.D. degree with the iudicium cum laude, the highest distinction for Ph.D. students that is given to the top 5% dissertations in The Netherlands. My Ph.D. thesis was also awarded the EECI Ph.D. Thesis Award by the European Embedded Control Institute. In 2023, I was awarded a VENI grant by the Dutch Research Council.

Since 2024 I am an associate editor of the IEEE Control Systems Letters. I am also a reviewer for different journals such as Automatica, IEEE Control Systems Letters and IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and conferences such as ACC, CDC, ECC and IFAC World Congress.

My complete CV is available upon request.

Further interests

Besides science, I enjoy hiking in places like the Swiss Alps, the Washington Cascades and the Jostedalsbreen National Park in Norway. I am also passionate about classical music. Bach is my go-to composer for unmatched counterpoint and creativity. I highly recommend the quality recordings of the All of Bach project, for example the (reconstructed) Violin Concerto in D minor, the Matthäus Passion, and the -very technical- Trio Sonata in G major (recorded in the Groninger “Oethoezn”). For more Romantic ideas, Mahler's symphonies are all splendid and it is difficult to pick a favorite. I have grown to like both their turmoil and tranquility, although I recently lean more towards the latter in his Fourth Symphony.