Lamia Iftekhar is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, North South University (NSU), Dhaka, Bangladesh, where she has been serving since September 2012. She teaches Control Engineering, Electronics and related courses. Her research interests includes Multi-Agent Systems, Learning-based Control, Embedded Systems and Robotics, as well as, Transportation Networks. She is currently serving as the faculty advisor of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Student Branch Chapter at NSU. Lamia has just returned from a year-long Sabbatical from NSU, during which she worked as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at New York University.
Lamia earned her Ph.D. in Engineering from Dartmouth College New Hampshire, USA in June 2012 under the supervision of Dr. Reza Olfati-Saber. Her work was on designing driving algorithms for network of autonomous vehicles. Prior to this, Lamia completed her undergraduate studies and Masters in Electrical Engineering simultaneously in 2009 under a four-years Honors BS/MS program from Polytechnic Institute of New York University, NY, USA. Her undergrad major was in Electrical Engineering and she had minors in Mathematics and Psychology. Lamia went back to her alma mater for 10 months again in 2021, this time as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar, to work at the C2SMART Transportation Center at Tandon School of Engineering at New York University.
Strongly believing in giving back to the community through volunteering work, Lamia has been an active IEEE member since 2008, while as an undergrad herself. She has been involved in IEEE activities and responsibilities throughout the years, serving in positions that includes being the Vice Chair of Women In Engineering Affinity Group of IEEE Bangladesh Section as well as the Humanitarian Activities Coordinator of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, Bangladesh Chapter. She also advises the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Student Branch Chapter at NSU, the first of its kind in Bangladesh – formed in 2017.
Lamia’s current research interests is two-fold: transportation and robotics. She has been fiercely passionate about transportation issues for a long time since her beloved home city Dhaka’s urban transportation is unique in nature and full of challenges. Her research interests in this category includes vehicle safety, intelligent transportation systems, networked vehicles, driver behaviour modelling, traffic model and congestion control.
Lamia’s other field of interest includes multi-agent systems, hybrid systems, nonlinear control and cooperative systems, all mostly applied to robotics. She is particularly intrigued by the idea of using multi-robot systems for disaster management and humanitarian purposes in the context of Bangladesh. She also believes that there’s a huge potential in using robotics to promote sincere interest in STEM amongst the school students of her country, specially the female students.
