Category: Awards

FSE PhD Supervisor of the Year 2026 for Stephan Trenn

Dr. Stephan Trenn has been awarded the PhD Supervisor of the Year Award 2026.

From 2018 onwards, the PhD Council, in collaboration with the sounding board, annually awards the PhD Supervisor of the Year Award within the Faculty of Science and Engineering. The PhD students of the Faculty are invited to nominate their supervisor for their outstanding supervisory practices. Based on the feedback and praise provided by the students, the finalists and winner are chosen by voting by the PhD Council.

The selection of the finalists and the winner is done by the Council, based on the feedback provided by those students. This year, they received 26 unique nominations out of which the 3 finalists were selected. The winner was announced during the Faculty Opening of the Academic Year on Monday, August 31.

Shaoxuan Cui receives ECC 2026 Outstanding Student Paper Award

Dr. Shaoxuan Cui has been awarded the Outstanding Student Paper Award at the 24th European Control Conference (ECC 2026), held in Reykjavík, Iceland, from July 7 to 10, 2026. The award recognizes his paper, “Markov Chains and Random Walks with Memory on Hypergraphs: A Tensor-Based Approach”, co-authored with Lingfei Wang, Hildeberto Jardón-Kojakhmetov, Karl H. Johansson, and Ming Cao.

At the time of submission, Dr. Cui was a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen, jointly supervised by Prof. Ming Cao from the Engineering and Technology Institute Groningen (ENTEG) and Dr. Hildeberto Jardón-Kojakhmetov from the Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science, and Artificial Intelligence. He completed his PhD in March 2026 and is currently a postdoctoral researcher collaborating with Prof. Cao.

The awarded paper introduces a unified tensor-based framework for modeling Markov chains with memory and random walks on hypergraphs. It provides novel analytical tools for studying the steady-state and convergence properties of complex network processes, addressing both higher-order interactions and memory effects.

Jacquelien Scherpen and Arjan van der Schaft elected as EUCA Fellow 2026

The EUCA Fellow award has been initiated ‘to recognize persons who have made outstanding contributions and accomplishments in the field of interest of the European Control Association (EUCA)’. The first round of awards takes place in 2026 and comprises ten awards. Jacquelien Scherpen and Arjan van der Schaft are proud to be selected for this first class of EUCA fellows.

FARMLAB project funded by €2 million

FARMLAB, led by the University of Groningen researchers Saeed Ahmed and Bayu Jayawardhana, has been awarded €2 million from the NWO (Dutch Research Council) NXTGEN Hightech programme.

Together with Wageningen University & Research, TNO, Saxion University of Applied Sciences, and industry partners Green Dino, SMI Dokkum, Batenburg Beenen, DEMCON industrial systems, and ABdrone, the consortium will develop autonomous drones and ground robots for precision and regenerative agriculture, with real-world testing and national scaling ahead.

For more information see the university announcement.

IFAC High Impact Paper Award for Arjan van der Schaft

Arjan van der Schaft together with his coauthors Romeo Ortega, Bernhard Maschke and Gerardo Escobar have been awarded the High Impact Paper Award 2026 for their paper “Interconnection and damping assignment passivity-based control of port-controlled Hamiltonian systems” which appeared in Automatica, Vol. 38, pp. 585-596, April 2002.

This paper marks the start of the theory of nonlinear passivity-based control of physical systems represented in port-Hamiltonian form. Characteristic feature of this theory, and of its applications in various physical domains, is that the obtained control laws are often intrinsically robust and have a direct physical interpretation in terms of energy. The paper received around 2000 quotations according to Google Scholar. 

The presentation of the award will take place in the framework of the Opening Ceremony at the Busan IFAC World Congress on Sunday, 23 August 2026. This award is one of IFAC’s major awards and consists of a medal, certificate and prize money.

Bart Besselink receives ERC Consolidator Grant

The research proposal “Contracts for Control System Design (COCOS)” of Bart Besselink will receive 2 Mio € funding by the European Research Council (ERC). The ERC Consolidator Grant is a prestigious research funding program to support researchers who are in the early stages of their independent research careers and have demonstrated significant potential for conducting high-quality research. Bart proposes a new approach for control system design based on contracts, inspired by ideas from software design in computer science. He will develop a contract theory for control system design that includes techniques for the automatic design of component contracts aimed at optimizing system-level performance, and control design for contract satisfaction. The practical relevance of the theory will be tested by case studies in high-tech manufacturing systems and autonomous vehicles, and supported by efficient computational tools.

Jacquelien Scherpen winner of Prince Friso Engineering Award 2023

Prof. Jacquelien Scherpen, Director of the Groningen Engineering Center, at the Faculty of Science and Engineering (UG), has been voted Engineer of the Year 2023 by the expert jury. She received the Prince Friso Engineering Award 2023 in the presence of Princess Beatrix. Scherpen was one of three finalists for the award, all of whom were women this year. The announcement and award ceremony hosted by the Royal Institute of Engineers (KIVI) took place 15 March 2023 at Boskalis in Papendrecht.

“It is a wonderful recognition, also of our efforts in Groningen to put engineering on the map,” Scherpen said. “As an engineer you stand at the basis of societal challenges and you tackle those as a team with other disciplines. That is what is special about the UG; we are a broad-based university where you can, for a long time now, also study engineering. I hope this will win over prospective students and in particular, provide extra motivation for women to study engineering and pursue a career in engineering!”

The jury commended Prof. Jacquelien Scherpen for her versatility which she couples with substantive depth. At the University of Groningen, Scherpen is a driving force in strengthening and broadening the research and teaching in the field of engineering. She works closely  with businesses and also develops new programmes. The jury: ‘At the same time, she is also committed to the visibility of engineering in general, among other things by inspiring enthusiasm in young people for the engineering profession as well as overcoming gender stereotypes in female engineers. All in all, this makes her a role model for new generations of engineers.’

This was the ninth edition of the Prince Friso Engineering Award, which KIVI awards annually. Engineers who stand out in expertise, innovative capacity, entrepreneurship and social impact are eligible for the award, which is named after Prince Friso, who was an aerospace Engineer and member of KIVI. The winner of the award may call themselves Engineer of the Year. It has never happened before that the finalists only included women. In addition, an audience award, and the KIVI Engineering Student Team Award were also awarded.

Vici grant awarded to Prof. Ming Cao

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has awarded a Vici grant to Prof. Ming Cao, worth up to €1.5 million. With this money Prof. Cao can develop an innovative line of research in the field of the decision making process of autonomous robots. He will be able to set up his own research group for a period of five years.

The awarded project concerns the decision making process of autonomous robots. With autonomous machines becoming ubiquitous in industry and daily life, we should be able to control the way these systems make decisions. This project draws inspiration from social animals (biology), competitive human behaviors (marketing), and collective opinion formation (sociology). Employing a multi-disciplinary approach, we will improve decision-making processes of autonomous robots working in teams, especially when they are frequently influenced by stochastic perturbations. The project will improve the control of autonomous robots, broaden the application of robot teams, and benefit smart factories and digital societies in the long run.