Dr. Akbari Hamed is an associate professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Virginia Tech. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering with a specialization in Controls and Robotics from the Sharif University of Technology (Aryamehr University of Technology) in 2006 and 2011, respectively. Subsequently, he held a postdoctoral research fellow position under the supervision of Prof. Jessy W. Grizzle in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the University of Michigan from January 2012 to August 2014. He has received the outstanding paper award of the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), the 2022 Rudolf Kalman Best Paper Award from ASME Dynamic Systems & Control Division, and the 2022 Best Reviewers Award from ASME Letters in Dynamic Systems and Control. Dr. Akbari Hamed has served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), and American Control Conference (ACC), and as an Editor for IEEE RAS/EMBS International Conference for Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics (BioRob). He has delivered a TEDx talk on cooperative and bio-inspired robot locomotion. His research interests span control theory and robotics (focusing on distributed and decentralized control, nonlinear control, predictive control, data-driven control, robust control, robot locomotion, and quadrupedal and bipedal locomotion), optimization, dynamical systems, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.