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(8) It provided not only funding, but also invaluable opportunities to collaborate with leading experts in both academia and industry. This experience has helped me develop as a researcher and deepened my expertise in my field.

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(7) 🏆 What’s a moment of your career you are proud of? One moment I’m particularly proud of is being awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship to support my PhD research.

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(6) My research applies control theory to design fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control algorithms, helping ensure that maritime navigation remains safe and reliable, even when something goes wrong on board.

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(5) 🔬 What’s you research on and why is it important? I research on the ships of the future- safer, more efficient, and autonomous.

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(4) It was the experience of seeing mathematical models and equations come to life in real-world systems. The encouragement and mentorship of my controls professor further inspired me to pursue this field.

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(3) 🔧 Why have you decided to study control engineering? During my bachelors degree, I had the opportunity to work on several robotics projects that sparked my interest in control engineering.

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(2) Outside of academia, I enjoy spending time in nature and exploring new places through travel.

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(1) 📌 Briefly introduce yourself I hold bachelor's and master's degrees in Electrical and Control engineering, and I am currently pursuing a PhD at Delft University of Technology, where my research focuses on applying control theory to maritime systems.

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🔹 Meet the Leaders | NextCom by CSS 🔹 Say hello to our ECC Ambassador — Abhishek Dhyani More information in replies 📌 Briefly introduce yourself 🔧 Why have you decided to study control engineering? 🔬 What’s your research and why is it important? 🏆 What’s a moment of your career you are proud of?

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(11) A year later, NextCom was created, and I still remember how welcomed I felt at the ACC 2024 breakfast welcoming event, and since then I knew that I wanted to be part of this initiative and help others feel welcomed and supported in their journey as young researchers.

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(10) When I first started attending control conferences three years ago, I noticed there were limited opportunities specifically designed to help early-stage Ph.D. students and young researchers connect.

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(9) I want to make a difference in the Control Systems Society by supporting students and early-career researchers in building strong, lasting connections within the research community.

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(8) Despite differences in language and culture, I worked on a unified purpose of designing dynamic decision-making systems to solve real-world problems that would positively impact other people’s lives. That same motivation drives my interest in contributing to NextCom.

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(7) 🌐 What is your goal within NextCom and what do you hope to achieve? Over the past few years, I’ve had the pleasure of conducting research and collaborating with brilliant Ph.D. students and professors across four different countries.

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(6) Over the past two years, I have established theoretical guarantees for learning such policies and to understand the fundamental limitations and challenges involved. This line of work is crucial for building more reliable and sample-efficient machine learning-based feedback control systems.

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(5) that is, models capable of learning dynamics and designing control policies that generalize to unseen, heterogeneous environments while simultaneous stabilizing multiple different dynamical systems.

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(4) 🔬 What’s your research on and why is it important? Despite the tremendous advancements in AI, particularly in vision and language foundation models, there remains little understanding of how to develop foundation models for control tasks,

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(3) Outside of research and teaching, I enjoy picnics in Central Park with my wife, playing board games with friends, and volunteering at my church.

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(2) I hold an M.S. in Control, Signal, and Image Processing from the University of Paris-Saclay and an M.Eng. in Electrical Engineering from CentraleSupélec, both in Paris, France. I also earned a B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Campinas (Unicamp) in Brazil.

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(1) 📌 Briefly introduce yourself I am a third-year Ph.D. student in Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, where I am interested in learning for dynamics and control. Prior to joining Columbia, I was a research assistant in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford.

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🔹 Meet the Leaders | NextCom by CSS 🔹 Meet Leonardo Felipe Toso - CDC Ambassador! More information in replies 📌 Briefly introduce yourself 🔬 What’s your research on and why is it important? 🌐 What is your goal within NextCom and what do you hope to achieve? #NextCom #MeetTheLeaders #IEEECSS

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(9) If you’re ever unsure who to talk to or how to start a conversation, come find me. I’d be more than happy to chat.

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(8) The control community is full of kind, friendly people — I’ve made lasting friendships just by chatting during breaks. Personally, I love the social side of conferences. That’s why I joined NextCom’s leadership — to help make conferences more welcoming.

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(7) 💬 Your tip for making the most of a conference? Talk to people. It can feel intimidating at first, but most folks are genuinely happy to connect. Casual chats can lead to insights that talks and papers can’t.

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(6) That’s why I’m a big fan of TAC’s new model, where accepted papers can be presented at CDC. The robotics community has done this well, and I hope more journals follow.

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(5) 📚 What would you change in the academic system? I’d love to see more opportunities and incentives for journal papers. Journals let you go deeper and tell a fuller story, but you miss out on the interaction you get at conferences.

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(4) Now at Caltech, my research focuses on safety, resource efficiency, and resiliency in control systems — foundational topics that also tie back to space systems. In a way, I’ve come full circle: working on the problems that first inspired me, but now from a theoretical perspective.

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(3) That challenge blew me away and sparked my curiosity in control. I went back to UCSD for a PhD, initially hoping to work on rocket landings. While that turned out ambitious, I gradually got pulled into the elegance of control theory under Prof. Jorge Cortes — and I’ve loved the field ever since.

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(2) I started out aiming for a career in space systems, earning a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from UC San Diego and an M.S. in Astronautical Engineering from University of Southern California. I then worked at SpaceX on the mission assurance team when they tried to land rockets on ocean barges.

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(1) 📌 Briefly introduce yourself — and how you got into control engineering Hi, my name is Pio Ong, and I’m a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech in Prof. Aaron Ames's lab. To be honest, control engineering wasn’t on my radar at first.

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