Mircea Lazar is a Full Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), holding the chair on Constrained Control of Complex Systems. His main areas of expertise include measurement and control engineering, with a current research focus on model predictive control (MPC), AI and Koopman operator theory for data-driven control.

Mircea's research interests include stability analysis and control of complex systems, such as power systems, power electronics, fusion tokamaks, vehicle platoons, and biological systems. His work spans constrained control and MPC, control of nonlinear and hybrid systems using control Lyapunov functions and set-theoretic methods, and, more recently, data-driven modeling and control via Koopman operator theory, including his GeKo (convergent Koopman operator) framework for systems with inputs. He has worked on several application domains, including high-precision mechatronics, automotive control systems, biomedical systems, smart grids and smart buildings temperature and illumination control, power converters and amplifiers, and plasma control. He has been collaborating with several companies, including ASML, DAF, TenneT, Océ, Prodrive, Philips Research, IBS Precision Engineering, Ford Research Lab USA, and UTRC USA.

Mircea is active in international control systems governance, serving as Chair of IFAC Technical Committee 2.3 Non-linear control systems (from 2026) and the EUCA and DISC boards.

Mircea received both his Dipl. Ing. degree (2001) and MSc (2002) in Control Engineering from the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Engineering at the 'Gh. Asachi' Technical University of Iași. He received his Ph.D. in control systems from Eindhoven University of Technology in 2006, and was awarded the EECI PhD Award for the best thesis in Europe on Control of Complex and Heterogeneous Systems 2006–2007.

He became a tenure-track Assistant Professor in 2008, was tenured in 2011, was appointed Associate Professor in 2017, and became Full Professor in June 2026 in the Electrical Engineering Department of TU/e. He received a VENI personal grant for excellence in research from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) in 2008, and was a visiting professor at Boston University in 2011, within the Hybrid & Networked Systems Lab.

He has been an active member of the hybrid and nonlinear systems community, serving as Chair of the IEEE CSS Technical Committee on Hybrid Systems from 2011 to 2016, and as Main Chair and organizer of the 4th IFAC Conference on Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands, 2012). He is internationally recognized for his contributions to stability theory, Lyapunov methods, model predictive control, and hybrid systems, as well as, more recently, to Koopman operator theory for systems with control inputs, where he developed a convergent generalized Koopman operator framework (GeKo) for data-driven modeling and control. He has delivered delivered 14 invited talks at conferences (including IEEE ISTCC 2012, IFAC NMPC 2015, ECC 2023, KOT 2025) and universities worldwide (ETH Zürich, University of Stuttgart, Boston University, University of Oxford, Universite Grenoble Alpes). He has supervised 15 graduated PhD students (2 with Cum Laude distinction) and 5 postdocs, and has published more than 70 journal papers.

My research addresses a grand challenge in constrained control of complex systems: can data-driven predictive control offer the same guarantees as physics-based model predictive control? I develop a convergent Koopman operator theory to make this a certifiable discipline, with applications ranging from high-precision machines to continent-scale power networks.