Bao-Zhu Guo (Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, CN)
Marius Tucsnak (Institut de Mathématiques de Bordeaux, FR)
Stefan Volkwein (University Konstanz, DE)
Enrique Zuazua (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, ES)

Short biographies

Bao-Zhu Guo received the Ph.D degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in applied mathematics in 1991. From 1985 to 1987, he was a Research Assistant at Beijing Institute of Information and Control, China. During the period 1993-2000, he was with the Beijing Institute of Technology, first as an associate professor (1993-1998) and subsequently a professor (1998-2000). Since 2000, he has been with the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he is a research professor in systems control. He has also been with the School of Computational and Applied Mathematics, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa since 2004,  where he is a chair professor in control theory. Dr. Guo is the recipient of the One Hundred Talent Program from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (1999),  and the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars (2003). He is the author or co-author of over 170 international peer/refereed journal papers,  and four books including the books: “Stability and Stabilization of Infinite Dimensional Systems with Applications” (Springer-Verlag, 1999),  and “Active Disturbance Rejection Control for Nonlinear Systems: An Introduction” (Wiley & Sons, 2016). In 2013 he was selected as the Member of Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf). His research interests include mathematical biology;  the theory of control and application of infinite-dimensional systems. His recent works focus on active disturbance rejection control.

Marius Tucsnak received the master degree in mathematics from the University of Bucharest, Romania, in 1985 and the Ph.D. degree in Mathematics from the University of Orléans, France, in 1992. He has been working at Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy (Bucharest), the University of Versailles (France) and at the University of Lorraine (Nancy, France). He is currently professor at University of Bordeaux and holder of the chair Analysis and Control of Infinite Dimensional Dynamical Systems of the Initiative of Excellence of this university. He is a senior member of Institut Universitaire de France (IUF) since 2012.  His research interests are control of systems governed by partial differential equations (such as the wave, Schrödinger or nonlinear plate equations), analysis and control of fluid-structure interactions. He is a coauthor (with George Weiss) of the book Observation and Control for Operator Semigroups (Birkhauser, 2009).

Stefan Volkwein received his Ph.D degree at the TU Berlin in 1997. From 1997 to 2001 he was an assistant professor and from 2001 to 2009 an associate professor at the Institute of Mathematics and Scientific Computing of the University of Graz. From 2009 he works as a professor for Numerical Optimization at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Konstanz. Since 1994 he has been working in the area of PDE constrained nonlinear. Since optimal control problems for partial differential equation are often hard to tackle numerically, he utilizes different techniques of reduced-order modeling to approximate these optimal control problems by smaller ones that are tractable with less effort. The main focus of his work is on the method of proper orthogonal decomposition. An a-posteriori error analysis and the numerical realization of the reduced-order methods has been investigated in various articles. Moreover, he has been project leader of various interdisciplinary projects including industrial companies.

Enrique Zuazua  is a Professor of Applied Mathematics at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM). He is also an honorary member of Jakiunde, the Basque Academy of Sciences, Letters and Humanities, Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Lorraine,  France, member of Academia Europaea and an Ambassador of the Friedrich-Alexandre University in Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. From 2008-2012 he was the Founding Scientific Director of the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics (BCAM). He holds a degree in mathematics from the University of the Basque Country, and a dual PhD degree from the same university (1987) and the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris (1988).  In 1990 he became Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, to later move to UAM in 2001. He has been awarded the Euskadi (Basque Country) Prize for Science and Technology 2006 and the National Julio Rey Pastor Prize 2007 in Mathematics and Information and Communication Technology and the Advanced Grant NUMERIWAVES of the ERC in 2010. With over 200 articles published, his work has had an important impact (h-index = 33). His fields of expertise in the area of Applied Mathematics cover topics related with Partial Differential Equations, Systems Control and Numerical Analysis. He has supervised 23 PhD students and over 25 postdoctoral researchers. He is the editor-in-chief of ESAIM:COCV and member of the editorial committee of other Journals and of scientific committees of various centres and agencies.