What is your next adventure?
I will be joining the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences at University of Texas, Austin as a Postdoctoral researcher in the Fall of 2024. I will be doing research at the intersection of systems theory, control theory and machine learning.

What about your next adventure are you most looking forward to?
I am very much looking forward to meeting new people and discussing new ideas. While I have completely enjoyed the past five years at Georgia Tech in the Intelligent Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS) lab, I believe that learning new perspectives on how different problems should be approached is vital to becoming a researcher that is able to think ``out of the box”. I am looking forward to meeting people that will challenge, rather than validate, my understanding on what is considered ``state-of-the-art”; to an environment that will reinforce, rather than acknowledge, my current understanding of what are the open problems in the field of systems and control. Of course, as a prospective postdoc, I am also excited to potentially being more involved in teaching as well as mentoring junior PhD students. Hopefully, the students will be excited, too!

Did you have any previous co-op, internship, or research experience in this area?
The scope of the research I carried out during my PhD started forming 6 years ago, while I was writing my undergraduate thesis in Greece. During that time, I printed out and read various papers in the general area of control theory and reinforcement learning, and this is how I eventually came across the work of my current advisor, Dr. Vamvoudakis. I subsequently emailed Dr. Vamvoudakis to ask him a few technical questions on his papers and, after a few months, he offered me a PhD position here at Georgia Tech. 

During my PhD studies, I opted not to do any internships in favor of focusing fully on my current research topic. In this way, I have had the opportunity to expand my network by participating in 13 international conferences, and by collaborating with more than 30 researchers worldwide.

How did your educational experience at Georgia Tech help you to achieve your goals?
Georgia Tech has an extensive coursework on systems and control theory. These courses are naturally demanding in terms of time and effort required, however, they substantially helped me in being rigorous in my research and making progress faster. To put this into perspective, I estimate that about one third of my PhD thesis is solely owed to the knowledge I obtained from the outstanding course of Dr. Haddad on the analysis of Lyapunov and Riccati equations; an one-of-a-kind course that, arguably, only the Aerospace Engineering department at Georgia Tech is offering right now. 

Of course, I could not do without mentioning that I was incredibly lucky to be advised by Dr. Vamvoudakis. He is a mentor that really pushed me to my limits, challenging me to learn much more than I was initially limiting myself to. Most importantly, he taught me that endurance and persistence are two of the most important qualities in the journey of achieving your goals.

What advice would you give to an underclassman who would like to follow the same path?
Do not be afraid to explore new opportunities and challenge your understanding of things. I think there is often a misconception that when you set off the PhD journey, you are supposed to already be kind of familiar with your field of study. This is simply not true. It is in fact the very purpose of the PhD to push you to learn stuff. So, when looking for research/PhD opportunities, do not be afraid to contact a professor if you believe that the scope of their research does not align well with your current domain of knowledge. In fact, I suggest you have the same mindset even after you receive your graduate degree.