Women in Control Luncheon

Naomi Ehrich Leonard is Chair and Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and associated faculty in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University.  She is former Director of the Council on Science and Technology at Princeton and Founding Editor of the Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems. She received her BSE in Mechanical Engineering from Princeton University and her PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland.  She is a MacArthur Fellow, elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and winner of the 2023 IEEE Control Systems Award and the 2017 IEEE CSS Henrik W. Bode Lecture Prize. Leonard is Fellow of IEEE, IFAC, SIAM, and ASME.  Her current research focuses on dynamics, control, and learning for multi-agent systems on networks with application to multi-robot teams, collective animal behavior, social networks, and other multi-agent systems in technology, nature, and the visual and performing arts.

Melanie Zeilinger is an Associate Professor at the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering at ETH Zurich, where she is leading the Intelligent Control Systems group at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control. She received the diploma in Engineering Cybernetics from the University of Stuttgart in Germany in 2006 and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from ETH Zurich in 2011. From 2011 to 2012 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. From 2012 to 2015 she was a Postdoctoral Researcher and Marie Curie fellow in a joint program with the University of California at Berkeley, USA, and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tuebingen, Germany. From 2018 to 2019 she was a professor at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Her awards include the ETH medal for her PhD thesis, a Marie-​Curie IO fellowship and an SNF Professorship grant. She is one of the organizers of the new Conference on Learning for Dynamics and Control (L4DC). Her research interests include learning-​based control, as well as distributed control and optimization, with applications to robotics and human-​in-the-loop control.