Researchers working with ModConFlex and their Research interests

Albert Alcalde Zafra

Albert Alcalde Zafra is a PhD student and MSCA Researcher at the Chair for Dynamics, Control, Machine Learning and Numerics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU) Erlangen-Nürnberg.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and a master’s degree in Advanced Mathematics and Mathematical Engineering from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain. For his Master’s thesis, he applied data-driven methods to study the dynamics of flows in the second layer of Earth’s atmosphere, known as the stratosphere.

In his current research, supervised by Enrique Zuazua, he studies general data-driven techniques for Artificial Intelligence based modelling. The aim is to provide rigorous mathematical underpinnings for these models that find a natural application in physics-based problems.


Ignacio Nicolás Díaz Alastuey

Ignacio Diaz

Ignacio Nicolás Díaz Alastuey was born in Viña del Mar in Chile. He obtained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in electronic engineering from the “Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María”, Valparaíso, Chile. During the M.Sc. his research focused mainly on the modelling and control of piezoelectric actuators with a port-Hamiltonian system formulation.

Currently, Ignacio Díaz is a PhD student and MSCA Researcher at FEMTO-ST in Besançon with Yann le Gorrec. His focus is on the control design for nD flexible systems, using boundary or in domain actuators/sensors.


Bouchra Elghazi

Bouchra Elghazi

Bouchra Elghazi is an MSCA Researcher and part of the Functional Analysis Group at the University of Wuppertal (Department of Mathematics and Informatics) under the supervision of Birgit Jacob. Her research in the Europe Horizon ModConFlex project revolves around the well-posedness of port Hamiltonian formulations, with a particular focus on models related to floating wind turbines.

Her academic career began at Mohamed V University (Rabat), where she earned her BSc in Mathematics. Afterwards, she completed a MSc in Mathematics and Applications at Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University (Fez), achieving distinction. Throughout her master's studies, her focus was on functional analysis, and in her Master's thesis she worked on the sufficient conditions for the existence of an optimal solution for a general optimal control problem.


Maddalen Irigoien Kortabitarte

Maddalen Irigoien

Maddalen Irigoien Kortabitarte is an MSCA Researcher in the ModConFlex project and a PhD student with George Weiss at the School of Electrical Engineering at Tel Aviv University.

Originally from the Basque Country, Spain, Maddalen completed her bachelor’s degree in Physics and a master’s degree in Mathematical Physics at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Currently, she is applying the gained knowledge on how to model the physical world in a mathematically coherent way to develop novel control techniques for the control and stabilization of floating wind turbines within the framework of ModConFlex.


Qian Liu

Qian Liu is originally from China, where he received his B.Eng. and M.Eng., both in electrical engineering, from North China Electric Power University, Beijing. During his master's program, Qian specialized in fault analysis and protection of power systems with a high penetration of inverter-based resources. He also actively participated in various industrial projects, including fault analysis and protection configuration for offshore wind farms, along with resilient operation and control-protection of low-inertia power systems. Currently, Qian is a researcher in the ModConFlex project and pursuing a Ph.D. degree under the supervision of Xiaowei Zhao at the School of Engineering of the University of Warwick, Coventry, U.K. Qian Liu's research interests revolve around the stability analysis and control design of grid-forming wind turbine generators.


Kaja Krhač

Kaja Krhač is a Croatian MSCA researcher at the University of Wuppertal where she is a member of the Functional Analysis group. Her main goal in the scope of the ModConFlex project is to obtain conditions for well-posedness and stability of plate models with boundary sensors, which are a particular class of port-Hamiltonian systems on two-dimensional spatial domain. Tackling this problem utilizes both her background in theoretical physics and applied mathematics.

Kaja Krhač  holds a Master's degree in Physics from the University of Zagreb and a Master's degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of Twente where she first got interested in port-Hamiltonian systems theory. She works as a PhD student under the supervision of Birgit Jacob.


Vicente Esteban Ocqueteau Canales

Portrait Vicente Ocqueteau

Vicente Esteban Ocqueteau Canales is an MSCA Researcher at the Institut de Mathématiques de Bordeaux (IMB), University of Bordeaux. Originally, he is from Santiago, Chile.
He obtained his Bachelor's degree in Mathematical Engineering and his Master’s degree in Applied Mathematics, both at University of Chile. His topics of interests revolve around Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). More specifically, he is interested in areas such as Inverse Problems, PDE Control and Numerical Analysis of PDE. Briefly, his PhD research under the supervision of Marius Tucsnak is about modelling and analyzing the interaction between water waves and floating wind turbines.


Mario A. Sinani

Mario Sinani

Mario A. Sinani is a ModConFlex Researcher at the Department of Aeronautics, Imperial College London. His research under the supervision of Andrew Wynn and Rafael Palacios focuses on dynamical systems, control theory and machine learning, specifically pertaining to high order nonlinear systems and fluid-solid interaction. He is currently developing novel mathematical analysis and data-driven model discovery methods for nonlinear control of highly flexible structures interacting with fluid flows.

He received his BSc and MSc in Mechanical Engineering with a focus in Control Theory, Dynamical Systems and Robotics from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. His thesis on event-triggered nonlinear model predictive control (ET-NMPC) for quadrotor trajectory tracking problems was published at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2023).

Prior to joining Imperial College London, he worked as a researcher in particle detector technologies at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland as well as an R&D engineer developing novel dynamic light control systems in Zurich, Switzerland.

 


Yuhan Su

Portrait Yuhan Su

Yuhan Su is a ModConFlex Researcher and a PhD student under the supervision of Xiaowei Zhao in the Intelligent Control and Smart Energy Research Group at the School of Engineering, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.

Originally from China, Yuhan obtained his master‘s degree in Informatics & Electronics from Xiamen University, Xiamen, China. During his master’s program, Yuhan focused on research topics including intelligent control, adaptive control, and adaptive dynamic programming, with applications in complex systems under various physical and task-oriented limitations. His current research interests primarily lie in developing reinforcement learning-based control methods for wind farms and other wind energy systems.


Filippo Testa

Filippo Testa

Filippo Testa is from the region of Abruzzo in Italy and is a PhD candidate at the Applied Mathematics Department of the University of Twente, in the Netherlands, with Hans Zwart. He is also an MSCA Researcher in the Europe Horizon ModConFlex project. His background is in abstract Mathematics: he studied for both his Bachelor (“Laurea triennale in matematica”) and Master’s degree (“Laurea magistrale in matematica”) at the University of Pisa. He was initially interested in abstract algebra, but moved towards analysis during his Master’s, writing a thesis on a classical PDE subject: Kato and Fujita’s semigroup approach to the Navier-Stokes equations.

Filippo Testa presently works on infinite dimensional systems theory, in particular within the framework of port-Hamiltonian systems and his PhD project is about generalizing some known results for 1-dimensional physical systems to multi-dimensional ones, using tools from differential geometry.


Alan Josué Valadez Altamira

Alan Valadez

Alan Josué Valadez Altamira is an MSCA Researcher in the Power Electronics for Renewable Energy group at Tel Aviv University within the Horizon Europe ModConFlex project.

Alan obtained his bachelor's degree in mechanical and electrical engineering from the Universidad de Guadalajara, Guadalajara, Mexico, and a master's degree in electrical engineering from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma, Mexico City, Mexico. His master's thesis delved into integrating wind farms into power systems, ensuring compliance with grid codes using economic dispatch models.

While pursuing a PhD under the supervision of George Weiss, Alan focuses on modelling floating wind farms and their seamless integration into the electrical grid while prioritizing adherence to stringent security requirements outlined in grid codes.


Ziqi Wang

Ziqi Wang

Ziqi Wang is from China and currently an MSCA Researcher and PhD student with Enrique Zuazua at the Chair for Dynamics, Control, Machine Learning and Numerics at the Department of Mathematics, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen Nürnberg. Before that, he received his master’s degree in control science and engineering from Beihang University, Beijing, and his bachelor’s degree in aircraft design and engineering from Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China. His research interests include guidance and control of complex dynamical systems and learning-based control algorithm design.

In the framework of the ModConFlex project, he is working on developing data-driven modeling and control of fluid-structure interactions and implementing federated learning techniques to utilize diverse data while maintaining privacy constraints.


Zhuo Xu

Zhuo Xu

Zhuo Xu is an MSCA Researcher and a PhD student at the Institute of Mathematics of Bordeaux, France, with Marius Tucsnak. He is from Hubei, People's Republic of China; and earned his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, respectively Operations Research and Cybernetics, from Northeast Normal University in Changchun, Jilin Province, China.

His Master's thesis focused on the analysis of fluid water-solid interaction systems in radial cases. It involved describing the vertical movement of a rigid body in a cylinder. Initially, he applied Hamilton's principle to derive a nonlinear system. Subsequently, he utilized the Banach fixed-point theorem to establish the well-posedness of the nonlinear system. His primary interest lies in the control theory of fluid and fluid water-solid interaction systems, encompassing optimal control, null controllability, time-optimal control, and related areas.

His PhD research will revolve around control theory in fluid equations or fluid water-solid interaction systems.


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