Maria Prandini received her Laurea degree in Electrical Engineering, summa cum laude, from Politecnico di Milano in 1994, and her Ph.D. in Information Technology from the University of Brescia, Italy, in 1998. From 1998 to 2000, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. She has held visiting positions at Delft University of Technology (1998), the University of Cambridge (2000), the University of California, Berkeley (2005), ETH Zurich (2006), and the University of Oxford (2022–2028). She is currently a WASP Distinguished Guest Professor at Lund University (2026–2027).
In 2002, she joined Politecnico di Milano as an Assistant Professor of Systems and Control, and she has been a Full Professor since 2018.
She is currently President of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) for the 2026–2029 triennium and has been a Council Member of the European Control Association (EUCA) since 2024. She has also held several roles within the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
She was the principal investigator of the EC-funded projects FP6 iFly (2007–2011), FP7 MoVeS (2010–2013), and H2020 UnCoVerCPS (2015–2018). More recently, she has led two PRIN projects (2023–2026) on a data-driven cooperative framework for managing distributed energy and water resources, and on the Scenario Approach for Control and Non-Convex Design.
She has served on the editorial boards of Automatica, IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, European Journal of Control, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, and Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems.
She is actively involved in the organization of international conferences, including as Co-General Chair of the 2024 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and Program Chair of the 2021 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.
In 2018, she received the IEEE CSS Distinguished Member Award for her contributions to stochastic, hybrid, and distributed control systems, as well as for her outstanding service to the Control Systems Society in electronic publications and conference activities. In 2019, she was elevated to IEEE Fellow for contributions to stochastic, hybrid, and distributed control systems theory.
Her research interests include hybrid systems, randomized algorithms, constrained control, nonlinear identification, distributed optimization, data-driven control design, and applications of control theory to transportation and energy systems.