Leila Bridgeman

Leila Bridgeman joined Duke as an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science on January 1, 2018.

She received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Applied Mathematics in 2008 and 2010 from McGill University, Montreal. In 2016, she completed a Ph.D. in Mechanical engineering, also at McGill University.

Her doctoral research involved a return to the foundational work of George Zames, exploring how the theory of conic sectors can be used to design controllers that guarantee closed-loop input-output stability when more conventional methods fail to apply. Her graduate studies involved research semesters at University of Michigan, University of Bern, and University of Victoria, along with an internship at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) in Boston.

Through her research, Leila strives to bridge the gap between theoretical results in robust and optimal control and their use in practice. She explores how the tools of numerical analysis and input-output stability theory can be applied to the most challenging of controls problems, including the control of delayed, open-loop unstable, and nonminimum-phase systems.  Her focus has been on the development of readily-applicable controller synthesis and stability analysis methods based on the evaluation of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). Resulting publications have considered applications of this work to robotic, process control, and time-delay systems.

She is also interested in model predictive control (MPC) especially when applied to switched systems. Bridgeman continues to collaborate with colleagues at MERL, enabling the use of MPC in novel applications including networked systems, vehicle control, heating, and ventilation.