Mario Zanon

Mario Zanon is an Associate Professor at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy. He holds a B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering (University of Trento, 2008), an M.Sc. in Mechatronics (University of Trento, 2010) and General Engineering (Ecole Centrale Paris, 2010), and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (KU Leuven, 2015). His postdoctoral research (2015–2017) was at Chalmers University of Technology. He joined IMT Lucca in 2018 as Assistant Professor, advancing to his current rank in 2021.

His research focuses on Reinforcement Learning, distributed and economic Model Predictive Control (MPC), optimal control of nonlinear systems, with applications in aerospace and automotive domains. He investigates safety-critical systems, autonomous driving, and coordination of vehicles in mixed traffic environments. His work emphasizes theoretical guarantees, computational efficiency, and practical implementation.

Recent publications highlight advancements in MPC stability, safe autonomous systems, and optimization algorithms for machine learning. His studies on intersection coordination and disturbance modeling contribute to safer, efficient autonomous vehicle systems. Current research trends include reinforcement learning integration with MPC, data-driven terminal cost design, and scalable optimization for complex systems.

Zanon’s work has been applied to real-world scenarios like vaccine distribution optimization during the pandemic and thermal welding modeling. He collaborates with industry partners on autonomous driving and robotics, emphasizing practical, safety-first solutions. Future directions include advancing learning-based MPC and exploring hybrid systems in robotics.