Dr. Leila Bridgeman

Biography

Leila Bridgeman joined Duke University as an Assistant Professor in the Thomas Lord Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science on January 1, 2018. She received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Applied Mathematics from McGill University in 2008 and 2010, respectively, and completed her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at McGill University in 2016. Her doctoral research built upon foundational work by George Zames, focusing on the theory of conic sectors for controller design that guarantees closed-loop input-output stability in scenarios where conventional methods fail. During her graduate studies, she engaged in research at the University of Michigan, the University of Bern, and the University of Victoria, along with an internship at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) in Boston. Bridgeman's research aims to bridge the gap between theoretical results in robust optimal control and their practical applications, particularly in the context of numerical analysis and stability theory in control systems. She has published extensively on various applications, including robotics and process control, and is particularly interested in model predictive control (MPC) for switched systems.

Research Interests