Chris Verhoek is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, under the supervision of professor Nikolai Matni. He is also affiliated with the Control Systems (CS) Group at the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology. His current research is on Control Architecture Theory. His main research interests include control architecture theory, optimal and nonlinear control, data-driven control, and systems theory.

Chris Verhoek obtained his BSc degree in Mechatronics from the Avans University of Applied Sciences Breda in 2017. He obtained his MSc degree in Systems and Control with Cum Laude distinction from the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), where his thesis was on incremental dissipativity analysis and control, and performance shaping for nonlinear systems. His M.Sc. thesis was selected as best thesis of the Electrical Engineering department in the year 2020. After his MSc graduation he worked for 5 months as a University Researcher in the Control Systems Group at Eindhoven University of Technology, prior to his PhD trajectory that started in February 2021. In May 2025, he received his PhD degree with Cum Laude distinction, also from the TU/e. His thesis was on data-driven control of nonlinear systems with stability and performance guarantees. During his PhD, he also contributed to the AI4GNC (Artificial intelligence techniques for GNC design, implementation, and verification) project in cooperation with SENER and the OSIP (Open Space Innovation Platform) project in cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA). In the fall of 2023, he was a visiting researcher at the IfA, ETH Zürich, Switzerland. His PhD thesis was selected as the best PhD thesis of the Electrical Engineering department at TU/e in the year 2020. He additionally received the 2025 Best PhD Thesis Award from the Dutch Institute of Systems and Control (DISC) and the 2026 Best PhD Thesis Award in Systems and Control from the European Embedded Control Institute (EECI). He started as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania in December 2025.