ECR group Archives - ACE - Automatic Control Engineering Network

Mien Van

Co-Lead of the Early Career Researcher Group

Mien Van is a Senior Lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast with longstanding experience in Robotics and Intelligent Control. Dr. Van has been PIs and Co-Is of many projects (~£1.5M in total) funded by the EPSRC, NERC, Royal Society, ONR Global, Innovate UK and Dstl/MOD to advance control theory, control engineering, and robotics technologies. He has published over 80 journal (first authors of over 40 journal papers) and conference articles, receiving citations over 3300 and a h-index of 31. He received 3 best paper awards. He is an associate editor for several reputation journals such as IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, Scientific Reports, and IJCAS (springer). He is currently leading a strong research team robotics and intelligent control with more than 10 members.

His research interests include robust control, intelligent control and its application for robotics for extreme environments.

James Pickering

ECR Committee Member

James E. Pickering is a Lecturer in Control Engineering at Aston University, Birmingham, where he is part of the Department of Mechatronics Engineering. He pursued his PhD part-time while teaching control engineering at Coventry University, completing his doctorate as an external student at the University of Wolverhampton in 2020. In 2022, James was appointed to his current academic role at Aston University, Birmingham.

James has a strong passion for applied control theory and enjoys tackling industrial challenges. He currently serves as the Programme Director for the Future Vehicle Technologies MSc at Aston University and is a particularly keen advocate for bridging the knowledge gap between control theory and industrial control systems in practice.

Zehor Belkhatir

ECR Committee Member

Dr Zehor Belkhatir is a Lecturer in the School of Electronics and Computer Science and Programme Leader for BEng/MEng Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southampton (UoS). She is also a member of the Institute of Life Sciences at UoS.

Zehor received her joint MEng. and M.Sc. Degrees from National Polytechnic School of Algiers in Automatics and Control Systems Engineering. Then, she carried on her doctoral studies at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) where she received her PhD degree in Electrical Engineering. Zehor held the position of Lecturer in Control Engineering at the University of Leicester and De Montfort University, and before that she was a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York, USA.

Zehor’s research interests encompass work across the fields of applied mathematics, control systems theory, and data analysis. She is particularly interested in developing control, estimation and computational data analytics techniques with a particular emphasis in applying them to biomedical/biological systems and automotive/robotic systems. She is a member of the Technology Conferences Editorial Board (TCEB) and the European Control Association (EUCA) Conference Editorial Board.

Ziwei Wang

ECR Committee Member

Ziwei Wang is a Lecturer in Robotics at Lancaster University, leading the Advanced Robotic Teleoperation Lab at the Lancaster Intelligent, Robotic and Autonomous Systems Centre (LIRA). He received the Ph.D. degree from the Department of Automation at Tsinghua University, China. Prior to joining Lancaster University, he worked as a Research Associate with the Human Robotics Group in the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London, U.K.

His main research interests and expertise include teleoperation systems, human sensorimotor augmentation, and human-robot interaction. He has led research projects as PI or Co-I funded by Horizon 2020, Innovate UK, The Royal Society, etc. He was a Visiting Scholar at King’s College London, UK, and is the Robotics and AI Collaboration (RAICo) Fellow funded by Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, UK Atomic Energy Authority, Sellafield Ltd and The University of Manchester. He has served as an Associate Editor of Biomimetic Intelligence and Robotics (BIROB), Guest Editor of IEEE Transactions on Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems. He is the receipt of Young Author Award at IFAC Workshop on Control Applications of Optimization in 2018, Best Paper Award of IEEE International Conference on Automation and Computing in 2022, Best Poster Award of IROS Workshop 2022.

Anton Selivanov

ECR Committee Member

Anton Selivanov is a Lecturer in Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield. He earned his PhD from St. Petersburg University, Russia, in 2014, followed by postdoctoral research positions at Tel Aviv University, Israel, and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden.

Anton’s research focuses on the robust control of dynamical systems governed by partial differential equations and delay differential equations. His work aims to develop stabilising controllers and assess their robustness against practical challenges, including input/output delays, external disturbances, measurement noise, and parameter uncertainties. His primary research methodologies involve Lyapunov functionals, linear matrix inequalities, and Fourier series analysis. Anton serves as an Associate Editor for the IFAC journal Automatica.

Ross Drummond

ECR and Clean Growth Committee Member

Ross Drummond is Lecturer in Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield. He completed his MEng degree from Imperial College London and his DPhil from the University of Oxford.

His research aims to improve our understanding of systems described by feedback loops. A particular focus is on applications to lithium-ion battery technology where he has developed methods to improve manufacturing, modelling, and pack-level performance. Besides batteries, another main application is on improving the robustness of neural networks using control theory techniques.

Boli Chen

ECR Committee Member

Boli Chen is a Lecturer in Control Engineering at University College London, where he has been a faculty member since September 2019. He obtained his PhD from Imperial College London in 2015 and continued his research there as a postdoctoral researcher until 2019.

His research interests include the control, optimization, and estimation of complex dynamical systems, with a focus on applications in automotive, transportation, and electric energy systems.

He is a Senior Member of IEEE and serves as an associate editor for the European Journal of Control and on the EUCA Conference Editorial Board.

Fulvio Forni

Lead of the Early Career Researcher Group

Fulvio Forni is a Professor of Control Engineering at the University of Cambridge, where he has been a faculty member since October 2015. He earned his PhD from the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’ in 2010. Following his doctorate, he conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Liège in Belgium and held visiting positions at the University of Edinburgh in the UK and the University of California Santa Barbara in the US.

Forni’s research interests encompass feedback control and robotics. He received the prestigious IEEE CSS George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award in 2020.

He is a Director of Studies of Newnham College at Cambridge and serves as a co-investigator for the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Agrifood Robotics ‘Agriforwards’.