Rate My Professor Kostas Margellos

Kostas Margellos is an Associate Professor of Engineering Science in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, where he joined the Control Group in March 2016. He received his Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece, in 2008, and his PhD in Automatic Control from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in November 2012, supervised by Professor John Lygeros. Following his doctorate, he held postdoctoral researcher positions at ETH Zurich from December 2012 to December 2013 with Professor John Lygeros, at the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, University of California, Berkeley, from January 2014 to January 2015 with Professor Shmuel Oren, and at the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, from February 2015 to February 2016 with Professor Maria Prandini. His appointment at Oxford was partially supported by MathWorks from 2016 to 2019. Margellos is also an Official Fellow in AI and Machine Learning at Reuben College, where he serves as Dean, and a Lecturer at Worcester College.

His research interests lie in control and optimization of complex systems, including reachability analysis and optimal control of hybrid systems, data-based optimization, randomized and robust optimization, statistical learning theory, decentralized and distributed computation, and decision making in power networks with uncertainty. These efforts apply to automating charging of electric vehicles, energy management in buildings, and shared mobility systems. Margellos received the ETH Medal for his PhD thesis in 2013. He has been awarded six Teaching Excellence Awards by the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford upon nomination by undergraduate students since 2019, along with two Excellence Awards from the head of department. He serves as Associate Editor for Automatica since 2020 and for IEEE Control Systems Letters since 2023, and has been on the Conference Editorial Board for IEEE CSS, EUCA, and IFAC since 2016.