Dr. Vasileios Tzoumas joins Department of Aerospace Engineering faculty
Dr. Vasileios Tzoumas will join the faculty of the U-M Department of Aerospace Engineering as an assistant professor in January 2021.
The University of Michigan Department of Aerospace Engineering would like to welcome Vasileios Tzoumas as its new assistant professor beginning in January 2021. Previously a research scientist in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he will be bringing his unique insights into trustworthy collaborative autonomy for aerospace systems to enhance research and teaching as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dr. Tzoumas has a distinguished academic careers that includes a Ph.D. in Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania (’18), a Master of Arts in Statistics from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania (’16), and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania (’16).
Inspired by a childhood passion for airplane model kits that continues to this day as he recently completed a model of the famous Saturn V moon rocket, Dr. Tzoumas’ interests include robotics, cyber-physical systems and self-reconfigurable aerospace systems with an emphasis on control, learning, and perception, as well as robust and adaptive combinatorial and distributed optimization for an Internet of Resilient Robot Teams (IoR2T). An example of this is the development of systems that will allow swarms of drones to aid firefighters even in fiery, smoky environments that are confusing and where the drones may have to continue working even as some are destroyed.
According to Dr. Tzoumas, his future goals include work on the technological convergence between cyber capabilities for a distributed intelligence driven by adaptive learning and resource-aware control and perception algorithms, and the physical capabilities of self-reconfigurable robotic and aerospace systems, self-healing materials, and smart devices.
Dr. Tzoumas’ awards include Best Paper Award in Robotic Vision at the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA); Best Student Paper Award finalist at the 2017 IEEE Conference in Decision and Control (CDC); and Best Presentation in Session Award, American Control Conference (ACC), 2015 and 2016.
“I am delighted to have Prof. Tzoumas’ join our department and I expect him to be a rising star in forming bridges between Aero and the several other departments in the College of Engineering,” said Department of Aerospace Engineering Dr. Anthony Waas.
