Victor Preciado

Victor Preciado is an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, holding appointments in the Departments of Electrical & Systems Engineering and Computer & Information Science. He is affiliated with the Warren Center for Network & Data Sciences, the PRECISE Center, and the Applied Math and Computational Science graduate group. His research bridges Network Science, Dynamical Systems, and Data Science, focusing on modeling, analysis, and control of complex networked systems.

• Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT (supervised by Prof. George Verghese)
• Visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, Santa Fe Institute, and Courant Institute (NYU)
• Postdoctoral researcher at GRASP Lab (working with Prof. Ali Jadbabaie)

His research interests include epidemic modeling and control, socio-technical networks, network controllability, and data-driven optimization. Recent work explores contact-aware robotics and operator learning using attention mechanisms.

His publications from 2022–2024 highlight advancements in robust control, epidemic tracking, and hypergraph neural networks, with applications in pandemic management, robotics, and temporal network analysis.

Scientific awards include:

• 2024: IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Best Paper Award finalist (for Stabilization of Complementarity Systems)
• 2022: IEEE Control Systems Magazine Best Paper Award (retrospectively for Analysis and Control of Epidemics)
• 2017: National Science Foundation CAREER Award
• 2019: IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering Best Paper Award runner-up

He has served as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering and IEEE Transactions on Control of Networked Systems, and as Guest Editor for special issues on pandemics and control of epidemics in journals like Annual Reviews in Control and SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization.