Rate My Professor Dragan Nesic

Dragan Nesic is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Melbourne, where he currently serves as Deputy Head (Research and Research Training) since January 2013. He received his PhD in Systems Engineering from the University of Melbourne in April 1997, with a thesis titled "Dead-beat control for polynomial systems" under the supervision of Prof. I.M.Y. Mareels. He also holds a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering degree awarded in September 1990. Following his PhD, Nesic held postdoctoral fellowships at CESAME, Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium (April 1997–January 1998), and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA (January 1998–February 1999). He joined the University of Melbourne in September 1996 as a Research Fellow, later holding positions as Lecturer (1999–2000), Senior Lecturer (2001–2002), Associate Professor and Reader (2003–2006), and Professor since June 2006.

Nesic's research interests are in the broad area of control engineering, including its mathematical foundations such as Lyapunov stability theory extensions like input-to-state stability (ISS), averaging and singular perturbation methods for nonlinear systems with disturbances. He has developed novel frameworks for controller design for nonlinear sampled-data systems via approximate discrete-time models, with applications including multi-robot systems, internal combustion engines, atomic force microscopes, Lithium-Ion batteries, and Raman optical amplifiers. Additional contributions cover nonlinear networked control systems, event-triggered control, privacy and security in cyber-physical systems, and optimization-based control for general nonlinear systems using value and policy iteration methods. Current ARC-funded projects include "When stabilization and optimization meet: a codesign approach" (2021-2023) and "Enabling the Internet of Things (IoT): structured networked control systems" (2020-2022). He has received major awards and fellowships such as ARC Future Fellowship (2010-2014), Australian Professorial Fellowship (2004-2009), IEEE Fellow (2006), Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Control Systems Society since 2008, and Humboldt Fellowship (2003). Nesic has served as Associate Editor for Automatica (2003-2015), IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems (since 2016), Systems and Control Letters (2001-2010), European Journal of Control (2007-2011), and IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (2004-2008). His scholarly impact is evident in being the most published author in Automatica and fourth in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (2004-2015), with key publications including "Nonlinear sampled-data systems" (Encyclopedia of Systems and Control, 2014), "Networked control systems with communication constraints: Tradeoffs between transmission intervals, delays and performance" (IEEE TAC, 2010; over 1000 citations), and numerous book chapters on sampled-data and networked control.