Li awarded Manfred Thoma Medal

Na Li, the Winokur Family Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has received the Manfred Thoma Medal from The International Federation of Automatic Control.

The medal, which is awarded every three years, recognizes outstanding contributions of a researcher under 40 to the field of systems and control. Li was recognized for her fundamental contributions to the control of multiagent networked systems and applications to biomedical and energy systems.

At SEAS, Li’s research focuses on control, learning, and optimization of networked systems, with the goal to develop foundational decision-making tools to explore and exploit real-world system structures that can lead to reliable, efficient, and autonomous operation of those systems. Her work has applications in energy systems, such as grids, buildings, robotics, and biomedical systems.

Li received the medal this summer at the IFAC World Congress in Yokohama, Japan. 

Li received the B.S. degree in Mathematics in 2007 from Zhejiang University in China and the Ph.D. degree in Control and Dynamical Systems in 2013 from California Institute of Technology.