Biography

Anthony Siming Chen was born and raised in Taiyuan, China, where he completed his secondary education at Taiyuan No. 5 Middle School. He received his B.Eng. degree in Transportation Engineering in 2015 from Central South University, graduating in the top 1% of his cohort. He was admitted on academic merit to Shenghua Honors College’s National Advanced Engineering Talent Experimental Programme. As part of his final-year studies, he completed a one-year industrial placement at CRRC in China. After moving to the United Kingdom, he obtained his M.Sc. degree in Advanced Mechanical Engineering in 2016 with the top overall grade in the cohort, and his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2022 from the University of Bristol. His doctoral research was conducted within the Dynamics and Control Research Group (DCRG). He has held postdoctoral and visiting positions at the Control Systems and Robotics Group (CSR) and the Centre for Robotics and AI at The University of Manchester, the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Institute for Advanced Automotive Propulsion Systems (IAAPS) at the University of Bath.

He is currently an Assistant Professor in Aerospace Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Nottingham. He holds secondary appointments in the Department of Mechanical, Materials, and Manufacturing Engineering (M3) and the School of Computer Science. He is a member of the Mechanical and Aerospace Systems Research Group (MAS), Rolls-Royce UTC in Gas Turbine Transmission Systems, and the Institute for Aerospace Technology (IAT). He also currently holds an honorary research position with CSR at the University of Manchester.

Dr. Chen is a RAICo Fellow, Member of IEEE (MIEEE), Member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (MIET), Member of the Royal Aeronautical Society (MRAeS), Member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). He is actively involved in the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS). He serves on the IEEE Technical Committee on Quantum Computing, Systems and Control, the IEEE Technical Committee on Robot Learning, the IEEE Technical Committee on Robotic Hands, Grasping and Manipulation, and the IEEE Technical Committee on Robot Control. He is an Associate Editor of Aerospace Science and Technology and Journal of Artificial Intelligence & Control Systems. He regularly publishes in and reviews for leading journals and conferences in control and robotics, including IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Automatica, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, IEEE Control Systems Letters, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, ICRA, IROS, and CDC. He received the Best Student Paper Award at the 9th IEEE International Conference on Modeling, Identification, and Control (2017) for his work on adaptive control of spark-ignition engines. His research lies at the intersection of control theory, machine learning, and robotics, with a particular emphasis on real-time safe learning-based control for complex real-world systems. His work spans applications in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), aero-engines, nuclear robotics, quantum systems, and defence-relevant autonomous technologies.