Until February 2024, Prof. Alrifaee was a Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the Chair of Informatik 11 – Embedded Software (led by Prof. Stefan Kowalewski) in the Department of Computer Science at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. He is the founding director of the Cyber-Physical Mobility (CPM) group and the CPM Lab at RWTH. In 2023, he held a visiting scholar position at the Information and Decision Science Laboratory (led by Prof. Andreas A. Malikopoulos) in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Delaware, USA. Prof. Alrifaee received his Diploma degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Ilmenau, Germany, and his PhD from the Institute of Automatic Control (led by Prof. Dirk Abel) in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at RWTH in 2010 and 2017, respectively.

Prof. Alrifaee was the recipient of the starting grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG) Research Training Group 1856: Integrated Energy Supply Modules for On-Road Electromobility. He has acquired several DFG research grants, including projects in the Priority Program 1835: Cooperatively Interacting Automobiles, in the Collaborative Research Centre Transregio 339: Digital Twin of the Road System – Physical-Informational Representation of the Future Road System, as well as an individual research grant. Prof. Alrifaee leads a project funded by the German Federal Ministry for Digital and Transportand has led two projects funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research as well as projects with industrial partners. He is a recipient of a teaching grant from the Exploratory Teaching Space of RWTH, and his PhD student Patrick Scheffe was awarded the Young Research Award 2023 by the Intelligent Transportation Systems Society Germany Chapter for his outstanding work in the CPM Lab. Prof. Alrifaee received the Best Associate Editor Award in 2023 for his editorial service in the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles and holds Senior Member status within the IEEE.

His research philosophy aims to create a link between interdisciplinary thinking, practical application, and societal benefit. In this context, Prof. Alrifaee's research focuses on distributed predictive control, service-oriented architectures for control systems, and applications to connected and automated vehicles.

Prof. Alrifaee considers the University of the Bundeswehr Munich as an excellent place to continue his passion for research and teaching in the field of autonomous systems. He is very much looking forward to working with outstanding colleagues at the Department of Aerospace Engineering and across departmental boundaries.

Welcome, Prof. Alrifaee!

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