Professor Maria Prandini of the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano has been elected President of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) for the three-year period 2026-2029.
This is a prestigious recognition from the international systems and control engineering community for Professor Prandini, currently Coordinator of the Degree Program in Automation Engineering. In the final round of elections, the professor from the Politecnico beat candidates from the United States, the Netherlands and China, becoming the second Italian president since the IFAC was founded in 1957 and the first woman to hold the position.
The IFAC is a worldwide organization with more than 2,500 volunteers, which has the goal of promoting the science and technology of automatic controls for the well-being of humanity through the organization of conferences, the publication of prominent journals, the coordination of technical committees, the establishment of awards and recognitions and the support of initiatives to promote automatic control, especially in developing countries.
Maria Prandini is Alumna in Electronic Engineering 1994. From 2002 to 2011, she was Researcher in the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the Politecnico di Milano and, in 2011, she became Associate Professor–later Full Professor–in the same department. Her recent and current projects include UnCoVerCPS (Unifying Control and Verification of Cyber-Physical Systems) for the European Commission, MoVeS (Modelling, verification and control of complex systems: from foundations to power network applications) and iFly (Safety, Complexity and Responsibility based design and validation of highly automated Air Traffic Management).
