Alexander Leonessa

Dr. Alexander Leonessa obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the University of Rome, ``La Sapienza', Rome, Italy, in April, 1993. After that he spent two years completing his military service as a Navy Officer and working for Alitalia Airlines as Aircraft Maintenance Supervisor.

In September 1995, Dr. Leonessa joined the School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, where he was conferred two M.S. degrees in Applied Mathematics and Aerospace Engineering, as well as a Doctoral degree in Aerospace Engineering. His research focused on the development of a hierarchical nonlinear robust control framework that provides a rigorous alternative to designing gain scheduled feedback controllers for general nonlinear systems. All the results obtained under this work constituted original research and are documented in his book “Hierarchical Nonlinear Switching Control Design with Application to Propulsions Systems” (published by Springer-Verlag, 2000) as well as in 30 archival journal and conference publications which have either appeared or will soon appear.

In January 2000, Dr. Leonessa joined the faculty of the Department of Ocean Engineering at Florida Atlantic University where he was part of the Underwater Vehicles group. There, he gained valuable experience in conducting sponsored research while teaching and advising students at both undergraduate and graduate levels. In August 2003 he transferred to the Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of Central Florida where he expanded his research interests to include autonomous aerial and ground vehicle as well the real-time collaborative control of all of these systems operating simultaneously. He has also been working on a nonlinear systems identification framework that allows postprocessing of the input/output data obtained from real experiments to obtain a state space description able to capture the observed system behavior.

Finally, in December 2007, Dr. Leonessa transferred to the Mechanical Engineering Department at Virginia Tech where he joined the Vibrations and Acoustics Laboratory. His research keeps focusing on guidance and navigation of autonomous vehicles, and includes problems such as adaptive and self learning control of complex systems, guidance and navigation in unknown environments, biomimetics and collaborative control.