Feiran Zhao

Postdoctoral researcher
ETH Zurich

Hi there! I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Automatic Control Laboratory (IfA), ETH Zurich, Switzerland, under the supervision of Prof. Florian Dorfler. Before that, I received his Ph.D. degree in Control Science and Engineering from the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2024, supervised by Prof. Keyou You (游科友). I was also a visiting scientist at the Automatic Control Laboratory (IfA), ETH Zurich, from December 2022 to May 2023. I received the B.Eng. degree in Automation from Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China, in 2018. His current research focuses on reinforcement learning, data-driven control, adaptive control, and their intersections.

Collaborations: I warmly welcome collaborations in many forms, including joint research papers, experimental collaborations, co-organized workshops or conference sessions, and the co-supervision of Master’s theses. If you are interested, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Latest News

  • 2026, May: I co-organized the NCCR Workshop on Interconnection of Autonomous Systems with Stefania Gavrila-Lonescu in Switzerland.

  • 2026, Apr: Our collaborative paper with my master student Felix Laurent at ETH Zurich on adaptive control of unknown linear switched systems via policy gradient methods was accepted by the European Control Conference (ECC) 2026.

  • 2026, Mar: I received the Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award from the Chinese Association of Automation.

  • 2026, Jan: Our collaborative paper with Niklas Persson at Mälardalen University on autonomous bicycle control appeared in IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology.

  • 2025, Dec: My master student Emmanuel Otibu Darko Korankye from Ashesi University defended his MSc thesis with top grades on direct data-driven and adaptive control for racing cars.

  • 2025, Nov: Our paper on data-enabled policy optimization for direct adaptive learning of the LQR appeared in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control as full paper.

  • 2025, Nov: Prof. Florian Dörfler gave an MIT LIDS seminar on November 12 on our work on LQR learning pipelines.

  • 2025, Nov: I gave an invited online talk on LQR learning pipelines at the Scalable Optimization and Control (SOC) Lab, University of California San Diego (UCSD).

  • 2025, Jun-Sep: I gave invited talks on LQR learning pipelines at the University of Stuttgart, University of Groningen, Delft University of Technology, Empa, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Beihang University.

  • 2025, May: Our paper on policy gradient methods for the cost-constrained LQR appeared in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

  • 2025, May: Our collaborative paper with Prof. Xuerui Wang at Delft University of Technology on unified aeroelastic flutter and loads control via data-enabled policy optimization appeared in IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems.

  • 2025, May: My master student Felix Laurent defended his MSc thesis on indirect policy gradient adaptive control for linear time-varying systems.

  • 2025, Jan: My master student Thierry Schwaller defended his semester thesis on bridging indirect and direct data-driven LQR control via regularization.