Faculty Profiles
Jorge Cortes
Professor, MAE
Systems and control, sensor networks, game theory, adversarial networks, cooperative robotics, and geometric mechanics
Professor Cortés' research interests lie in the area of systems and control, cooperative control, network optimization, distributed decision making and autonomy, systems orchestration, network science and complex systems, game theory, multi-agent coordination in robotics, transportation, power systems, and neuroscience, nonsmooth analysis, and geometric mechanics.
His research is characterized by its interdisciplinary nature and the connections between solid theoretical foundations, development of computational methods, and applications. His research program seeks to unveil the science and engineering that explains and enhances the operation of network systems. The ultimate aim is to understand the mechanisms that make complex networks function they way they do, and to use this knowledge to develop systematic methods to design better networks.
Capsule Bio:
Jorge Cortés is a Professor and holder of the Cymer Corporation Endowed Chair in High Performance Dynamic Systems Modeling and Control in the UC San Diego the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. He received a Licenciatura degree in mathematics from the Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain, in 1997, and a Ph.D. degree in engineering mathematics from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, in 2001. He held postdoctoral positions at the Systems, Signals and Control Department of the University of Twente in 2002 and at the Coordinated Science Laboratory of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2002 to 2004. He was an Assistant Professor with the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz from 2004 to 2007. He received a NSF CAREER award in 2006 and was the recipient of the 2006 Spanish Society of Applied Mathematics Young Researcher Prize.
Dr. Cortés is the author of "Geometric, Control and Numerical Aspects of Nonholonomic Systems" (New York: Springer-Verlag, 2002) and co-author of "Distributed Control of Robotic Networks" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). He was the recipient of the 2006 Spanish Society of Applied Mathematics Young Researcher Prize.
He has co-authored papers that have won the 2008 and the 2021 IEEE Control Systems Magazine Outstanding Paper Award, the 2009 SIAM Review SIGEST selection from the SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, the 2012 O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award in the Theory category, the 2019 and the 2023 IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems Outstanding Paper Award, and the 2025 IEEE Control Systems Letters Outstanding Paper Award.
At the IEEE Control Systems Society, he has been a Distinguished Lecturer (2010-2014), an elected member (2018-2020) of its Board of Governors, and the Director of Operations (2019-2022) of its Executive Committee, and has also received the Distinguished Member Award. He served in the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (2010-2012), IEEE Control Systems magazine (2012-2016), IEEE Access (2015-2017), Journal of Nonlinear Science (2018-2023), Systems and Control Letters (2009-2012), European Journal of Control (2006-2009), and Journal of Geometric Mechanics (2011-2022) and in the Conference Editorial Board of the IEEE Control Systems Society (2005-2009). He currently serves as Senior Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and on the editorial board of Geometric Mechanics. He is a Fellow of IEEE, SIAM, and IFAC.
