Dr. Jan Drgona

Biography

Jan Drgona is an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering and a member of the Ralph S. O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute at Johns Hopkins University. His research interests lie in differentiable programming, scientific machine learning, dynamical systems, optimization, and control. Drgona has particular expertise in deploying machine learning and advanced control methods for real-world applications, notably in building energy systems and industrial process control. He previously served as a principal investigator and research data scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), where he was the lead software developer for the Neuromancer SciML library, designed for solving constrained optimization and physics-informed machine learning problems. The library gained popularity as an open-source resource during his tenure at PNNL. Drgona is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery and regularly reviews for several related journals, including Applied Energy and IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology. He earned his BSc, MSc, and PhD in control engineering from the Institute of Information Engineering, Automation, Mathematics at the Slovak University of Technology, and held a postdoctoral position in the Mechanical Engineering Department at KU Leuven in Belgium.

Research Interests