Lamia Iftekhar is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, North South University (NSU), Dhaka, Bangladesh, where she has been serving since September 2012.  Enjoying a sabbatical from her teaching duties at NSU at the moment, she is currently visiting the C2SMART Transportation Center as a Fulbright scholar.  At NSU, she teaches Control Engineering, Electronics and related courses. Her research interests includes Multi-Agent Systems, Learning-based Control, Embedded Systems and Robotics, as well as, Transportation Networks. 

Lamia completed her Ph.D. in Engineering from Dartmouth College at New Hampshire, USA in June 2012 under the supervision of Dr. Reza Olfati-Saber.  Her work was on designing driving algorithms for network of autonomous vehicles.  Prior to this,  Lamia completed her undergraduate studies and Masters in Electrical Engineering simultaneously in 2009  under a four-years Honors BS/MS program  from Polytechnic Institute of New York University ( the current Tandon School of Engineering at NYU.) Her undergrad major was in Electrical Engineering and she had minors in Mathematics and Psychology. She is super happy to return as a visiting scholar to her alma mater where she spent her formative years, was blessed to have mentors such as Dr. Farshad Khorrami, and had the honor to receive the outstanding Graduate Award of her year.   

Strongly believing in giving back to the community through volunteering work, Lamia has been an active IEEE member since 2008, while as an undergrad herself. She has been involved in IEEE activities and responsibilities throughout the years serving as Vice-Chair at Women In Engineering Affinity Group of IEEE Bangladesh Section and the Humanitarian Activities Coordinator of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, Bangladesh Chapter. She also advises the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Student Branch Chapter at NSU, the first of its kind in Bangladesh – formed in 2017.

Lamia’s current research interests is two-fold: transportation and robotics.  She has been fiercely passionate about transportation issues for a long time since her beloved home city Dhaka’s urban transportation is unique in nature and full of challenges.  Her research interests in this category includes optimization of complex multimodal networks,  analysis of unique transportation modes in developing countries, sustainable urban transportation systems,   networked vehicles, driver behavior modelling, traffic model and congestion control.

Lamia’s other field of interest includes multi-agent systems, hybrid systems, nonlinear control and cooperative systems, all mostly applied to robotics. She is particularly intrigued by the idea of using  multi-robot systems   for disaster management and humanitarian purposes (including assistive technology for elderly care)  in the context of Bangladesh.  She also believes that there’s a huge potential in using robotics to promote sincere interest in STEM amongst the school students of her country, specially the female students.

Lamia can be found at the C2SMART Center or at NYU MakesSpace Mon-Thurs and is almost always available to chat about her work, other research, teaching best practices, her country, good books/comics/music and anything related to food!