Marios Polycarpou was born in Kaimakli, Nicosia, Cyprus, in 1962. Following two years of military service, he pursued undergraduate studies in the United States in 1983 as a scholarship recipient at Rice University, where he received a B.A. in Computer Science and a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering in 1987. He continued with postgraduate studies at the University of Southern California, obtaining an M.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1989 and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1992.
In 1992, he joined the University of Cincinnati, USA, where he became Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. In 2001, he returned to Cyprus with his family to join the newly established Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Cyprus as its first Professor. He served as the Department’s first Chair from 2001 to 2008.
Professor Polycarpou is currently Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Cyprus and Director of the KIOS Research and Innovation Excellence Centre, the largest research centre of the University of Cyprus, with more than 100 researchers. He also holds the position of Visiting Professor at Imperial College London.
His research and teaching interests include intelligent systems and networks, automatic control systems, neural networks and computational intelligence, fault diagnosis, and distributed systems. Together with his research group, he has published more than 350 articles in international scientific and technical journals, conference proceedings and book chapters, as well as seven books and six patents.
For his scientific contributions, Professor Polycarpou has received numerous awards and distinctions, including the 2016 IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award, the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant (2011), the first Research Excellence Award of the University of Cyprus (2015), and the Cyprus Research Award (2015). He has been honoured as an IEEE Member and an IFAC Member, and received the Best Paper Award of the journal Building and Environment (Elsevier) for 2014.
Professor Polycarpou has delivered keynote lectures at more than 50 international conferences. He served as President of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (2012–2013) and as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (2004–2010). Since 2018, he has served as President of the European Control Association (EUCA).
Over the past 25 years, Professor Polycarpou has participated in more than 60 research projects funded by European and American programmes.
