Short biography

Education

Current position

Previous positions

Awards and fellowships

Dissemination and editorial activities

Plenary and semi-plenary talks

Education	I received the Bachelor's degree in Automotive Engineering in September 2002 and the Master's degree in Automotive Engineering in October 2004, both with honours, from Politecnico di Torino, Italy. I received the Ph.D. degree in Information and System Engineering in February 2009 from Politecnico di Torino, with a dissertation entitled "Control of tethered airfoils for high-altitude wind energy generation".
Current position	Currently I am Full Professor of Automation and Control Engineering at Politecnico di Milano, since February 2024.
Previous positions	From September 2016 to January 2024 I was Associate Professor at Politecnico di Milano. From October 2013 to August 2016 I was with ABB Switzerland, Corporate Research, as Scientist/Senior Scientist. From September 2012 to September 2013 I have been with the Automatic Control Laboratory of ETH Zurich as Marie Curie Fellow/Senior Researcher (Oberassistent). From September 2010 to December 2012 I have been a Marie Curie Fellow in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UC Santa Barbara, in the framework of the EU FP7 project ICIEMSET. From February 2009 to August 2010 I held a post-doctoral research position at Politecnico di Torino. In 2005 I worked with a permanent contract at Fiat Research Center, Italy, in the field of research and development of vehicle active stability systems and of diagnosis and recovery algorithms.
Awards and fellowships	I have been awarded with the European Control Award in 2019, with the citation "For contributions to theory of constrained optimal control under uncertainty and applications to energy systems". In 2019 I have been also recipient of the Mission Innovation Champion Award for Italy. I am recipient of two Marie Curie Fellowships: an Intra-European one (2012 call, resigned to start my position at ABB Corporate Research) and an International Outgoing one (2009 call). The paper "High Altitude Wind Energy Generation Using Controlled Power Kites" that I co-authored with M. Canale and M. Milanese, has been awarded the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology best paper award in 2011 by the IEEE Control Systems Society. I have been awarded with the ENI Award "Debut in Research" prize 2010 and with the Maffezzoni prize 2009. During my MSc degree studies, I have been awarded with the "C. Ghiglieno" studentship, granted by Gruppo Dirigenti Fiat. I also received a scholarship from the Italian Automotive Technical Association (ATA) to carry out my Master's thesis, in the field of vehicle stability control.
Dissemination and editorial activities	I co-authored about 120 papers published on international journals and international conference proceedings. I serve as Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technolgoy since 2015. I served as guest editor for the special issue "To tame the wind: advanced control applications in wind energy" on the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology (currently in progress), with Prof. M. Morari, Prof. Mario Rotea and Dr. Greg Stewart. I serve as reviewer for several international journals including Automatica, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Control Engineering Practice, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control, International Journal of Control, Automation and Systems and for international conferences such as IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, American Control Conference and IFAC World Congress.
Plenary and semi-plenary talks	I presented my research in the following invited plenary and semi-plenary talks: 1) "Automation Challenges in AWE Systems and the Role of Academic Research" - Plenary, 8th Airborne Wind Energy Conference. Approx. 220 attendees. Glasgow, UK, 16/10/2019 (online); 2) "Airborne Wind Energy, data-based predictive control and the challenges of real-world autonomous systems" - Plenary, European Control Conference 2019. Approx. 900 attendees. Naples, Italy, 27/6/2019 (online); 3) "From machine learning to learning-based decision making" - Plenary, 5th Int. Conference on Information Technology and Data-Related Research (Sinteza). Approx. 200 attendees. Belgrade, Serbia, 20/4/2018; 4) "On autonomous take-off of tethered rigid wings in compact space for airborne wind energy" - Plenary, 7th Airborne Wind Energy Conference. Approx. 200 attendees. Freiburg, Germany, 5/10/2017 (online); 5) "Scenario and Adaptive Model Predictive Control of Uncertain Systems" - Semi-plenary, 5th IFAC Conference on Nonlinear Model Predictive Control. Approx. 150 attendees. Sevilla, Spain, 20/9/2015.