Professor Antonis Papachristodoulou is Department's new Chair of Control Engineering

Professor Antonis Papachristodoulou has been appointed as the Department’s new Chair of Control Engineering. The post was previously held by Professor David Limebeer from 2008 to 2019.

The Control Group at Oxford has been established for nearly 50 years. It currently consists of more than 40 members and delivers the control components of the undergraduate MEng course, as well as postgraduate teaching on the Centres for Doctoral Training in Autonomous Intelligent Machines and Systems (AIMS) and Engineering Biology CDT (EngBioCDT).

The appointment is a key part of the Department’s strategic plan to strengthen teaching and research in Control Engineering so that the control group can respond effectively to new applications and theoretical challenges relevant to feedback control. Current areas of activity within the group include large-scale, embedded, robust and distributed optimization; polynomial/sum of squares methods; robust and optimal control; and model predictive control. The group also covers applications ranging from biology to battery/energy management systems, transportation, aerospace, manufacturing systems and agriculture.

As the new Chair of Control Engineering, Professor Papachristodoulou will continue his research in feedback control theory and its applications in Engineering Biology, through flagship projects such as the EEBio Programme grant.

He says, “The Control Group in Oxford is one of the best places to study and do research in control and optimisation internationally and it is a great honour to support this further in the coming years.”

Professor Papachristodoulou joined the University of Oxford in 2006. From 2015-2021 he was EPSRC Fellow and from 2014-2023 Director of the EPSRC & BBSRC Centre for Doctoral training in Synthetic Biology. He obtained an MA/MEng degree in Electrical and Information Sciences from the University of Cambridge, U.K., in 2000.

In 2005 he completed a PhD in Control and Dynamical Systems at the California Institute of Technology, with a PhD Minor in Aeronautics. In 2015 he was awarded the European Control Award for his contributions to robustness analysis and applications to networked control systems and systems biology and the O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award. He is Fellow of the IEEE. He was previously associate editor for Automatica and IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and co-chairs the 2024 Learning for Decision and Control conference and serves as programme co-chair for the 2024 European Control Conference.

Head of Department Professor Ron Roy says of the appointment, “Prof Papachristodoulou has been delivering selfless leadership within the Control Engineering Group for several years now, and this appointment serves to underscore and enable his ongoing efforts on behalf of his colleagues and the department. He always places others first. In addition to being a world class engineer, Antonis is an exceptional colleague, teacher, mentor, and leader. We are very fortunate to have him on board.”