Rate My Professor Alejandro Donaire

Dr. Alejandro Donaire is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Engineering at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where he joined in 2019. He received his degree in Electronic Engineering in 2003 and PhD in 2009 from the Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Argentina, supported by the Argentine National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET). He also holds a Graduate Certificate from Universidad Nacional de Rosario-Santa Fe, Argentina. Donaire's career at the University of Newcastle began in 2009 as a Research Academic in the Centre for Complex Dynamic Systems and Control, followed by the Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from 2011 to 2015 in the School of Engineering. He then worked as a researcher at the PRISMA Lab, Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, University of Naples Federico II, Italy (2015-2017), and as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Future Environments, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queensland University of Technology, Australia (2017-2019).

Donaire's research focuses on modelling, analysis, and design of nonlinear control systems, with particular interest in passivity-based control methods, including interconnection and damping assignment (IDA-PBC), for nonlinear physical systems such as port-Hamiltonian systems. His applications span marine and aerospace mechatronics, multi-agent systems, robotics, smart micro-grids networks, electrical drives, and power systems. Fields of Research include Control Engineering (50%) and Calculus of variations, mathematical aspects of systems theory and control theory (50%). He has co-authored the book 'PID Passivity-Based Control of Nonlinear Systems with Applications' (2021), 6 book chapters such as 'Holonomic Rolling Nonprehensile Manipulation Primitive' (2022) and 'Passivity-based control design and experiments for a rolling-balancing system' (2018), 39 journal articles including 'Robust Consensus of a Class of Perturbed Port-Hamiltonian Systems With Time Delays' (2025) and 'Integral passivity-based control of an underactuated hydraulic soft manipulator with uncertain nonlinear stiffness' (2024), and 65 conference papers. Donaire has received the University of Newcastle Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (2011), 2010 Research Fellowship - PRCCDSC ($457,796), ARC Discovery Project 'Safe, Plug and Play, Multi Agent Dynamic Systems' (2022-2024, $447,948), and several Defence Science and Technology Group grants.