Michael M. Zavlanos

Michael M. Zavlanos is the Yoh Family Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering. He holds secondary appointments in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science. Additionally, he serves as Director of the Healthcare Systems Optimization program with Duke AI Health and is an Amazon Scholar with Amazon Robotics.

• National Technical University of Athens (NTUA): Diploma in Mechanical Engineering (2002)
• University of Pennsylvania: M.S.E. and Ph.D. in Electrical and Systems Engineering (2005, 2008)

His research spans Control Theory, Optimization, Machine Learning, and AI, with applications in Robotics, Cyber-Physical Systems, and Healthcare/Medicine. Recent work focuses on systems-level approaches combining mathematical optimization and AI to address healthcare challenges like surgery scheduling and resource utilization, reducing patient wait times, and enhancing operational efficiency.

His recent publications highlight trends in Distributionally Robust Optimization, Transfer Learning for Robotics, and Graph Neural Networks integrated with Path Signatures. These works emphasize algorithmic resilience to outliers, adaptation to visual observation changes, and modeling time-series data on graphs.

• Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award
• National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award

At Duke AI Health, Dr. Zavlanos leads initiatives to optimize healthcare workflows by leveraging predictive models, algorithmic technologies, and collaborations across engineering, surgery, and anesthesiology. His role bridges Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering with its School of Medicine to translate methodological innovations into clinical impact.