The Control Systems and Robotics group at the University of Manchester is organising the 2nd Rosenbrock Lecture Series to celebrate ground-breaking research accomplishments in the fields of Control Engineering and Robotics. Four distinguished world-leading experts in Control Engineering and Robotics will give the Keynote Lectures. 

Malcolm Smith received the B.A. (M.A.) degree in mathematics, the M.Phil in control engineering and operational research and the Ph.D. degree in control Engineering from the University of Cambridge, England. He was subsequently a Research Fellow at the German Aerospace Centre, DLR, Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany, a Visiting Assistant Professor and Research Fellow with the Department of Electrical Engineering at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, and an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Ohio State University, Columbus, USA. He is now a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College and a Professor in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He received the 1992 and 1999 George Axelby Best Paper Awards, in the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control in 1992 and 1999, both times for joint work with T.T. Georgiou. H was awarded the Sir Harold Hartley Medal 2009 (Institute of Measurement and Control) for “outstanding contribution to the technology of measurement and control”. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Kristin Y. Pettersen is a Professor in the Department of Engineering Cybernetics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), where she has been a faculty member since 1996. She is also an Adjunct Professor at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment. She co-founded the subsea robotics company Eelume AS, where she served as CEO from 2015 to 2016 and currently serves as a board member. She received the IEEE CSS Hendrik W. Bode Lecture Prize in 2020 and was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant in 2021. She is a Fellow of the IEEE and IFAC, and a member of the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and the Academy of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters.

Her main research interests are in the development of methodologies for the analysis and control of autonomous robots, with an emphasis on marine robotics and snake robotics.

Anders Rantzer was appointed professor of Automatic Control at Lund University, Sweden, after a PhD at KTH Stockholm in 1991 and a postdoc 1992/93 at IMA, University of Minnesota. The academic year of 2004/05 he was visiting associate faculty member at Caltech and 2015/16 he was Taylor Family Distinguished Visiting Professor at University of Minnesota. Rantzer is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and a Fellow of IEEE and IFAC. He has been chairman of the Swedish Scientific Council for Natural and Engineering Sciences as well as the Royal Physiographic Society in Lund. His research interests are in modeling, analysis and synthesis of control systems, with particular attention to scalability and adaptation.

Robert Bishop‘s research involves the history and philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, philosophy of social science, philosophy of mind and psychology, and metaphysics. He is particularly interested in chaos and complex systems and their philosophical implications. Dr. Bishop is the area editor for philosophy of science at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and looking for article proposals. See below for a link to submit yours! In his free time, Dr. Bishop enjoys reading, hiking, golf, the arts, music, games and homemade ice cream.