Michael M. Zavlanos, Ph.D.
Professor, Duke University
Amazon Scholar, Amazon Robotics
Bio
​Michael M. Zavlanos is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke University. He also holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science. He currently serves as the Director of the Healthcare Systems Optimization program with Duke AI Health and is also an Amazon Scholar with Amazon Robotics. His research focuses on control theory, optimization, machine learning, and AI with applications in autonomous systems and healthcare/medicine. He is a recipient of various awards including the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award and the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award.
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Michael M. Zavlanos received the Diploma in mechanical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in Greece, in 2002, and the M.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, in 2005 and 2008, respectively.
Recent News
Jul 2025. Evangelia Koskinioti defends her MSc thesis entitled "Variational Unbalanced Optimal Transport for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation: Applications to Medical Imaging" (co-advised with Prof. Giorgos Stamou at NTUA).
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Jun 2025. Pingcheng Jian defends his PhD thesis entitled "Robot Learning with Prior Knowledge: Leveraging Small Network Modules and Large Foundation Models".
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May 2025. Yi Shen defends his PhD thesis entitled "Risk-Averse and Distributionally Robust Optimization for Online and Offline DecisionMaking".
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Oct. 2024. Michael M. Zavlanos joins Duke AI Health as Director of Healthcare Systems Optimization.​