Each year the Control and Automation Technical Network is delighted to offer a Doctoral Dissertation Prize. The Prize recognises a student for their research excellence in the field of Control and Automation. The award is open to all relevant students who were awarded their PhD in the general area of Control and Automation, at a UK university

In 2023 the Technical Network awarded the Prize to Dr Kaiwen Chen from Imperial College London for his paper titled 'Adaptive Control for Time-Varying Systems: Congelation and Interconnection'.

Kaiwen Chen received the B.Sc. degree (Hons.) in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA, and the B.Eng. degree in automation from the Elite Program of the Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China, in 2016, the M.Sc. degree with distinction in control systems and the Ph.D. degree from Imperial College London, London, U.K., in 2017 and 2022, respectively.

He is currently a Research Associate with the Control and Power Research Group, Imperial College London. His research interests include nonlinear and adaptive control theory (with a focus on time-varying, large-scale, and multiagent systems) and its applications (with emphasis on cyber-physical-human systems and robotics).

Dr. Chen was the recipient of the Hertha Ayrton Centenary Prize (2018) and the Eryl Cadwallader Davies Prize (2023) for outstanding master’s thesis and doctoral thesis in electrical and electronic engineering, respectively. He is an Associate Editor on the Conference Editorial Board of EUCA (2022–). He is entitled to an inscription on the Bronze Tablets (2016) of the University of Illinois for academic excellence.

The Control and Automation Technical Network will not be running the awards in 2024 but you can keep up to date with the latest news and activity from the network by visiting our page.