Director of Operations

Current

2023 - 2025

Antonella Ferrara

The University of Pavia

Italy

8 (Africa, Europe, Middle East)

Email

Website

Antonella Ferrara

8 (Africa, Europe, Middle East)

Email

Website

Biography

Antonella Ferrara received the M.Sc. degree (Cum Laude and printing honors) in electronic engineering and the Ph.D. degree in computer science and electronics from the University of Genova, Italy, in 1987 and 1992, respectively. Since 2005, she has been Full Professor of automatic control at the University of Pavia, Italy, where she is the Head of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory, as well as the President of the Research Standing Committee of the Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering. Her research activities are mainly in the area of nonlinear control, with a special emphasis on sliding mode control, with application to road traffic, automotive systems, robotics and power systems. She is author and co-author of more than 450 publications including more than 150 journal papers, 2 monographs and one edited book.

She was Visiting Professor at Graz University of Technology, visiting scholar at the University of Minnesota, as well as Invited Lecturer at Harvard University, University of California at Los Angeles, University of Stuttgart, Technical University of Delft, INRIA Grenoble, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Hanyang University in Seoul, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Dalian Maritime University, National Institute of Technology Silchar, IIIT Kharagpur, Murdoch University, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Imperial College, University of Cambridge, and University of Exeter, among others. She was/is Principal Investigator in several European, international and national projects and was one of the eleven experts appointed by the Italian Ministry of Research to write the National Research Plan for the period 2021-2027 for the research area “Sustainable Mobility”.

She was Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems, of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and of the IEEE Control Systems Magazine. She was Subject Editor of the International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control. She was Associate Editor and Senior Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles. Since 2018 she has been Associated Editor of Automatica, and, since January 2022, Senior Editor of IEEE Open Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems.

She served as a member of the EUCA Council and, since ECC 2019, she has been the EUCA Conference Editorial Board Chair. She will serve as one of the IPC Chairs (together with Maurice Heemels) for the 24th IFAC Word Congress to be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 2029.

She was “appointed member” of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Control Systems Society in 2012. She was Chair of the Women in Control Committee of the IEEE Control Systems Society (July 2013-December 2016) and, at present, she is a member of the Advisory Board of that committee. She was “elected member” of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Control Systems Society for the triennium 2016-2018. She was member of the IEEE Control System Society Outreach Task Force (2017-2019) and was the Chair of the Task Force in 2020. She is incoming member of the ExCom of the IEEE Control System Society with the role of Director of Operations (2023-2026 term). In 2015-2019, she was a Member of the European Control Association (EUCA) Council.

She is a member of the IFAC Technical Committee (TC) on Nonlinear Control Systems, IFAC TC on Transportation Systems, IFAC TC on Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles, IEEE TC on Automotive Control, IEEE TC on Smart Cities, and IEEE TC on Variable Structure Systems. Among several awards, she was a co-recipient of the 2020 IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology Outstanding Paper Award. She is IEEE Fellow and IFAC Fellow.