Rate My Professor Inaki Esnaola

Dr Iñaki Esnaola is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield. He received an MSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Navarra in Spain in 2006 and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Delaware in 2011. Before joining the University of Sheffield, he worked as a Research Intern at Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent in New Jersey from 2010 to 2011 and served as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University from 2011 to 2013. He maintains an ongoing role as a Visiting Research Collaborator in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University.

Esnaola's research centres on information theory, communication theory, machine learning, data science and cybersecurity for cyberphysical systems, with particular emphasis on applications to electricity grids, robust estimation, optimal sensor placement and the detection of data integrity attacks. He has authored numerous peer-reviewed publications, including the 2025 paper 'Asymmetry of the Relative Entropy in the Regularization of Empirical Risk Minimization' in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and the 2024 paper 'An information theoretic metric for measurement vulnerability to data integrity attacks on smart grids' in IET Smart Grid. Esnaola teaches modules including ACS232 Signals, Systems, and Communications and ACS6106 Cybersecurity for control systems. He led the RCUK-funded project on sustainable advanced manufacturing via machine learning-assisted exploitation of sensing and data infrastructure from 2022 to 2023.