About Me
Postdoctoral Researcher
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of California, San Diego
Jacobs Hall
La Jolla, CA 92093
mabdelgalil{at}ucsd{dot}edu
Short Bio
Hello! I am Mahmoud Abdelgalil, currently working as a Postdoctoral Researcher at UC San Diego. I earned my bachelor's degree in aerospace and aeronautical engineering from Zewail university of science and technology in Egypt. I then joined the mechanical and aerospace engineering department at UC Irvine in 2018, finishing my master's and PhD degrees in March 2020 and March 2023, respectively. My recent research focused on geometric and multi-time scale techniques in dynamical systems with applications to model-free control and real-time optimization.
Research
An enduring fascination of mine lies in understanding how living organisms have evolved resilient control strategies to survive in their environments. My PhD dissertation identifies an intriguing link between the navigation strategies of certain microorganisms, like sperm cells, and extremum seeking control. On the control theory side, further exploration of this connection led me to formulate new results in high-order two-timescale averaging and 3D source seeking. On the biology side, my work offers new insights regarding the physics of the peculiar and seemingly discontinuous behavior of sea urchin sperm cells in the search for an egg.
In parallel, I've had a deep-seated interest in the interplay between geometry and dynamical systems. My current work explores the potential of the hybrid dynamical systems framework in overcoming topological obstructions in model-free control and optimization on manifolds.
Education
PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering - University of California, Irvine. March 2020 - March 2023
MSc in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering - University of California, Irvine. September 2018 - March 2020
BSc in Aerospace and Aeronautical Engineering - Zewail University September 2013 - June 2018
Awards and Honors
Best student paper award at the American Control Conference 2023.
Holmes endowed fellowship during Winter and Spring 2022.
Henry Samueli endowed fellowship during Spring 2019.
Selected Publications
Journal Articles
Abdelgalil, Mahmoud, Daniel E. Ochoa, and Jorge I. Poveda. "Multi-time scale control and optimization via averaging and singular perturbation theory: From ODEs to hybrid dynamical systems." Annual Reviews in Control 56 (2023): 100926.
Abdelgalil, Mahmoud, Yasser Aboelkassem, and Haithem Taha. "Sea urchin sperm exploit extremum seeking control to find the egg." Physical Review E 106.6 (2022): L062401.
Abdelgalil, Mahmoud, and Haithem Taha. "Recursive averaging with application to bio-inspired 3-D source seeking." IEEE Control Systems Letters 6 (2022): 2816-2821.
Abdelgalil, Mahmoud, and Haithem Taha. "Lie bracket approximation-based extremum seeking with vanishing input oscillations." Automatica 133 (2021): 109735.
Conference Proceedings
Abdelgalil, Mahmoud, Asmaa Eldesoukey, and Haithem Taha. "Singularly perturbed averaging with application to bio-inspired 3d source seeking." 2023 American Control Conference (ACC).
Abdelgalil, Mahmoud, and Haithem Taha. "Recursive averaging with application to bio-inspired 3-D source seeking." 2022 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC).
Preprints Under Review
Abdelgalil, Mahmoud, and Jorge I. Poveda. "On Lie-Bracket Averaging for a Class of Hybrid Dynamical Systems with Applications to Model-Free Control and Optimization." arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.15732 (2023), Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.
Abdelgalil, Mahmoud, and Jorge I. Poveda. "Global Uniform Extremum Seeking: A Second-Order Averaging Approach." (2023), Preprint.