Alba Gurpegui Ramón
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Ph.D. StudentDepartment of Automatic Control Supervisor: Anders Rantzer. ContactStreet: Ole Römers väg 1, 223 63 Lund, Sweden |
About me
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.” —Marie Curie.
Welcome to my academic website! I am a mathematician pursuing a Ph.D. in the Department of Automatic Control at Lund University. I am also part of the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program (WASP). I am originally from Spain, where I studied the Bachelor programme in mathematics at La Universidad Complutense de Madrid, but I moved to Sweden in 2020 to study the Master's programme in Mathematics at the Faculty of Sciences. After writing my thesis on a topic very related to control theory (see Publications), I applied for the Ph.D. position I currently hold.
In a nutshell, my research interests so far focus on optimal and robust control for large-scale systems, positive and monotone systems, and network synchronization. For more, see Research.
Outside of Work
I am passionate about travelling, singing, painting, writing and reading poetry, reading philosophy, and trying to master any form of artistic discipline that allows me to channel and express something that reverberates irrationally loud within me. On the weekends, I always try to go for long walks, preferably in nature, and if sunny, as close to the beach as possible. From time to time, I also enjoy challenging myself by taking part in theatre plays.
“Mathematical science shows what is. It is the language of unseen relations between things. But to use and apply that language, we must be able fully to appreciate, to feel, to seize the unseen, the unconscious.” —Ada Lovelace.
Recent Updates
Coming up
In June 2026 I will be Instructor at the 39th ECMI Modelling Week. Project: Probabilistic Risk Assessment for Power Grids.
In August I will be attending the IFAC World Congress 2026. See you in Busan!
13.04.2026: Paper Accepted at the IFAC WC 2026
I am super excited to announce that our paper Sparse State Feedback Control for Industrial Applications has been accepted for publication in IFAC-PapersOnLine and for presentation at the 23rd IFAC World Congress in Busan, Korea, 2026. Thank you to my collaborators Frida Norlund, Kristian Soltesz, and Anders Rantzer for a great project that has helped me expand my research in a new direction. Special thanks to Frida, whom I am fortunate to call a friend. It's been great sharing this journey together, and I'm so looking forward to the next adventures!
08-10.04.2026: Seminars at Penn
Sribalaji C. Anand suggested I visit Penn during my stay in the US. Thank you so much, Sri, for showing me around Philly, for the insightful discussions (of all kinds), and for your generous hospitality. I am also deeply grateful to Professors Nikolai Matni, Rahul Mangharam and George Pappas, who hosted me on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday respectively, giving me the opportunity to present seminars to each of their research groups. It was a wonderful three days filled with stimulating discussions, and I'm truly thankful to all the lab members for the engaging conversations and warm welcome.
07.04.2026: CAN-Lab Seminar at NYU
Prior to my visit to Penn I had the opportunity to present my research at the Tandon School of Engineering at New York University, hosted by Professor Zhong-Ping Jiang. I am very grateful to Professor Jiang and all lab members for the great discussions!
25.03.2026: Decision & Control Special Seminar at UIUC
During my stay in the US I was invited by Professor Carolyn Beck to visit the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign for a week and present my work at the Coordinated Science Lab. Thank you Carolyn!
02.03.2026: Publication Accepted in IEEE TAC
I am super happy to announce that our paper 'Minimax Linear Regulator Problems for Positive Systems’ has been recently accepted for publication as full paper in IEEE Transactions on Automatic control. This work presents a deterministic, multi-disturbance minimax Linear Regulator (LR) framework for positive linear time-invariant systems in continuous time.
Further details on the scalability of this problem class under state-bounded and nonnegative disturbances can already be found in: arXiv.
01.2026-04.2026: Visiting Scholar at Purdue University
I am currently visiting Professor Takashi Tanaka's lab at the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics. During this research visit I have been involved in two main projects that extend my work on L1 optimal control for positive systems to the stochastic and general-sum settings. In particular, this works demonstrate that the Linear Regulator framework is robust to multiplicative stochastic uncertainty and characterize the feedback and stationary Nash equilibria for a general-sum formulation. During my time here I am also joining the group meetings of professor Philip Paré who encouraged me to participate in the ICON Student Research Conference, where I was honored to receive the Excellence in Research Award.