Paolo Bolzern was born in Milano, Italy in 1955. He received his Doctor’s degree (Laurea) in Electronic Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano in 1978. From 1979 to 1981 he worked on modeling and control of environmental systems at IIASA, Laxenburg (Austria) and  Politecnico di Milano. In 1982, he was employed as a computer application engineer at ELC-Electroconsult. From 1983 to 1987, he was a research fellow with the Centro di Teoria dei Sistemi of the National Research Council (CNR) in Milan. In July 1987, he has joined the Politecnico di Milano, where he is currently a Full Professor of Automatic Control in the Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria. In the period 2000-2002 he served as vice-chairman of the Department and, from 2003 to 2011, he was the Coordinator of the Systems and Control area. He was in the Board of the PhD Program in Computer Science, Systems and Control from 1998 to 2002 and he is currently vice-chair of the PhD Program in Information Engineering.
He is a member of IEEE, an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, a member of the EUCA (European Control Association) Conference Editorial Board, a representative of the General Assembly of EUCA, Electronic Media Editor for IFAC, and a member of the IFAC Technical Committee on Optimal Control. He regularly serves as a reviewer for several scientific journals and was recognized as an outstanding reviewer of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (2001) and Automatica (2011 and 2012).
His current research interests include robust filtering and control, coordination of multi-agent systems, positive systems and control of deterministic and stochastic switched systems. On these and other related topics he has authored or co-authored almost 200 research publications, including some 80 papers published in international journals and books. He is a co-author with R. Scattolini and N. Schiavoni of the textbook Fondamenti di Controlli Automatici, McGraw-Hill (4 editions in Italian, and 1 in Spanish).
Since 1987 he has carried out a broad and intense teaching activity at Politecnico di Milano. He currently holds the courses of Fondamenti di Automatica (for students in the program of Management Engineering) and  Controllo dei Processi (for students in the program of Automation and Control Engineering).