Management Board Archives - ACE - Automatic Control Engineering Network

Lucia Marucci

Co-Chair of the Ageing Society Grand Challenge Research Committee

Lucia Marucci is a Professor of Systems and Engineering Biology at the University of Bristol. After completing her studies in Mathematics, Lucia started a PhD in Automatic Engineering, focused on the design of synthetic gene network (University of Naples, Italy, PhD award 2010). She then moved to the Centre for Genomic Regulation (Barcelona, Spain) where she was awarded an EMBO Long term fellowship to study gene expression dynamics in pluripotent stem cells.

Lucia moved to Bristol in 2013 and co-directs the Bristol BioDesign Institute, a specialised research institute in Synthetic Biology. Lucia’s research is focused on developing quantitative tools to understand cell dynamics and engineering-inspired methodologies for controlling living system functions, with the final aim to both disentangle and reprogram the complexity governing life.

Her approach combines tools from different disciplines: control engineering, systems and synthetic biology, and computer science.

Marko Bacic

Member of the Management Board

Professor Marko Bacic is an Engineering Associate Fellow in Control Systems and Gas Turbine Functionality at Rolls-Royce and also holds a University Research Lectureship at Oxford since July 2012. He completed his degree in Engineering and Computing Science (2001) and his D. Phil in Model Predictive Control (2004) both from the University of Oxford.

From 2003-2008, he was a fixed-term University Lecturer in Control Engineering at Oxford University and a Fellow of Lincoln College. During 2006-2007 he was seconded to Renault F1 (now Lotus F1) team with support from the Royal Academy of Engineering Industrial Secondment Scheme. He was a recipient of the 2012 Sir Henry Royce Award for Technical Innovation, for his work on the Model Based Detection Scheme for IP shaft break protection of three spool turbofans, and has received 2017 Sir Henry Royce Patent Award.

Marko holds more than 12 granted patents, and has more than 40 published papers and patent applications.

In 2020 Marko won the RAEng Silver Medal for outstanding personal contributions to UK engineering resulting in market exploitation.

Matt Greenhalgh

Member of the Management Board

Matt Greenhalgh is Product Development Manager at Siemens Motion Control. With nearly 15 years of experience in the field of drives and controls, he is dedicated to driving new developments at Siemens Motion Control. His background in power electronics has been instrumental in the development of Siemens SINAMICS G series industrial drives.

In his current role as Product Development Manager, Matt leads a team of talented hardware design engineers in the UK. He has a broad range of experience, from design engineering to project management, allowing him to provide strategic guidance and technical expertise.

SINAMICS G drives are cutting-edge solutions designed to address the evolving needs of a wide range of industries worldwide. I am passionate about leveraging technology to improve efficiency, security, and sustainability. By exploring concepts like automatic control systems, I aim to empower engineers with innovative solutions.”

William Heath

Member of the Management Board

William Heath is Head of the School of Computer Science and Engineering at Bangor University and Chair of the United Kingdom Automatic Control Council. He was previously Head of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Manchester. He received his BA and MA in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge and his MSc and PhD in Systems and Control from UMIST.

His research is focused on feedback control for systems with simple nonlinearities such as actuator saturation, rate constraints, backlash or hysteresis. Recent highlights include new frequency domain characterisations of the O’Shea-Zames-Falb multipliers for absolute stability. He has closed the loop for several industrial applications, including nanopositioners, high speed Diesel engines, plastic film extruders, edible oil refiners and water management systems.

Kate Kelly

Member of the Management Board

Kate Kelly is the Research Programme Manager for the Automatic Control Engineering Network.

Kate has over 10 years of research project management experience and has a proven track record of successfully planning, managing, and delivering transdisciplinary, multi-stakeholder programs funded by UKRI within the Higher Education sector. She is deeply committed to fostering collaborative partnerships and driving impactful, positive change for both people and the planet. Her work spans a diverse range of stakeholders, including the private sector, government and policy organizations, NGOs, and local community groups, both nationally and internationally.

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.

Visakan Kadirkamanathan

Member of the Management Board

Visakan is Director of the Rolls-Royce supported University Technology Centre in Control, Monitoring and Systems Engineering and a Professor at the University of Sheffield. He is a past Head of the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at Sheffield and a past Chair of the UK Automatic Control Council (UKACC). His undergraduate and PhD degrees are from the University of Cambridge.

His research is focussed on the areas of system identification, signal processing and control with applications that span from engineering in aerospace and manufacturing sectors to life science and healthcare. His research received the PNAS Cozzarelli Prize for best paper in Applied Sciences and has received funding from the UK research sponsors, the EPSRC, BBSRC, NERC, MRC and the InnovateUK for a number of projects. He is a past Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Systems Science and has served as a General Chair of national and international conferences.

Constantinos (Kostas) Theodoropoulos

Co-Chair of the Clean Growth Challenge Research Committee

Constantinos (Kostas) is Professor of Chemical and Biochemical Systems Engineering, in the Department of Chemical Engineering (CE).

He received his BSc in Mathematics from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece and his MSc and PhD in Chemical Engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo, USA. He then worked as a post-doctoral associate in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Princeton University.

He sustains a world-leading group in the interdisciplinary area of industrial biotechnology and multi-scale process dynamics of biochemical systems. I integrate advanced detailed computational modelling, optimisation, experimental design and control along with innovative experiments at a range of scales for process and product design. The focus is on the innovative bioproduction of added value products from sustainable biomass resources.

His research contributions in the area of Industrial biotechnology have been recognised by the 2011 IChemE Innovation and Excellence Award for bioprocessing. His research group develops state-of-the-art computational algorithms for the dynamics, optimisation and controller design of complex large- and multi-scale (bio)chemical systems and follows this through to implementation for the experimental bioconversion of biorefinery byproducts to added value chemicals. He has over 150 publications, in high quality scientific journals and indexed book chapters as well as a US patent granted. He has secured and led a number of research grants from EPSRC, BBSRC, InnovateUK, Royal Society, and EU and sustains successful collaborations with the industry. He has also given plenary, keynote, and invited lectures/seminars at large international conferences, prestigious workshops, and research-intensive universities around the world.

Alessandra Parisio

Chair of the Clean Growth Challenge Research Committee

Alessandra Parisio is a Professor of Control of Sustainable Energy Networks, in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) at the University of Manchester, where she is PGT Director for the department. She has been principal or co-investigator on research projects supported by UKRI, European Commission, and industrial partners in the areas of building climate control and distributed optimisation and control for flexibility service and grid support provision, totalling nearly £7 million as University of Manchester share.

Prof. Parisio is IEEE senior member, co-chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Smart Buildings and vice-Chair for Education of the IFAC Technical Committee 9.3. Control for Smart Cities. She has been in the program committees of several international conferences and has served/serves as editor of journals within the control and power system areas, currently of the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, European Journal of Control and Applied Energy.

Prof. Parisio received the IEEE PES Outstanding Engineer Award in January 2021 and the Energy and Buildings Best Paper Award for (for a ten-year period between 2008-2017) in January 2019.

Her main research interests span the areas of control engineering, in particular Model Predictive Control, distributed optimisation, stochastic constrained control, and power systems, in particular energy management systems under uncertainty, optimisation and control of multi-energy networks and distributed flexibility.

Nabil Aouf

Chair of the AI and Data Grand Challenge Research Committee

Prof Nabil Aouf obtained his PhD from McGill University in 2002, specializing in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. He currently holds the prestigious position of Professor of Autonomous Systems and Machine Intelligence at City University of London. Dr. Aouf is also the esteemed Director of the Autonomy of Systems Centre (ASC) and the Co-Director of the London Space Institute (LSI) at City University of London. He leads the Robotics, Autonomy and Machine Intelligence (RAMI) group and has established robust collaborations with leading industries and research organizations renowned for their expertise in autonomous systems and space research. With a remarkable portfolio of over 220 rigorously peer-reviewed journal and conference publications, Prof. Nabil Aouf’s scholarly influence is profound. In addition to his academic accolades, he serves as an Associate Editor for 4 esteemed journals, including holding a senior editorial position in the IEEE Transactions of Intelligent Vehicles.
Research Interests
Theory and application of Robotics and Autonomous Systems (Ground, Air and Space) Intelligence, and in particular:
• Perception (P) of Autonomous Vehicles through AI, Computer Vision, and Image processing
(Machine Learning and Deep Learning)
• Guidance (G) (Path Planning), Navigation (N) (Localization), and Robust Control (C)
Systems
• Decision-making through the planning and re-planning of Autonomous Systems Tasks
• eXplAInability (XAI) of Deep Learning based PGNC solutions for Autonomous Systems
• Real-time and embedded Machine Intelligence solutions.
• Adversarial Learning and Mitigation for AI-based Autonomous Systems
• Virtual/Augmented Reality based Human-Machine-Interaction

Publications