September 4, 2025
The award will support research into scalable, verifiable design of multi-agent autonomous systems
Gioele Zardini has been named a 2025 recipient of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award (YFA). The DARPA YFA award, which provides up to $1M in funding along with mentoring and Department of Defense (DoD) engagement, will support Zardini’s project, CHORDATE: Categorical Hierarchical Optimization for Robust Design of Adaptive Technologies.
The project seeks to redefine how complex autonomous systems are designed, operated, and verified. Current approaches to system design are fragmented, domain-specific, and computationally intractable, making it difficult to jointly optimize heterogeneous components or adapt designs under uncertainty. Zardini’s research introduces new compositional frameworks that integrate applied category theory, domain theory, optimization, and probabilistic methods to overcome these challenges.
“Our approach introduces a paradigm shift in the design of adaptive multi-agent systems,” said Zardini. “By unifying model-based and data-driven tools, we can create rigorous yet tractable frameworks that allow stakeholders across disciplines to collaboratively design societally-critical systems that are scalable, resilient, and verifiable by design.”
Gioele Zardini is the Rudge (1948) and Nancy Allen Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a Principal Investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), and an Affiliate Faculty member of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS).
Before joining MIT in 2024, he earned his Ph.D. at ETH Zurich, where his dissertation received the ETH Medal in 2024, and was a Postdoctoral Scholar for six months at Stanford University in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He has held various visiting positions at nuTonomy Singapore (then Aptiv, now Motional), Stanford, and MIT.
Driven by societal challenges, the goal of Zardini’s research is to develop efficient computational tools and algorithmic approaches to formulate and solve complex, interconnected system design and autonomous decision making problems. His interests include the co-design of complex systems, from future mobility systems to autonomous systems, compositionality in engineering, planning and control, and game theory.
He is the creator of Autonomy Talks, an ongoing international seminar series that promotes a diverse exchange of research on autonomy. Zardini is also a lead organizer for various seminal workshops at leading conferences including ICRA, ITSC, CDC, and ACC. His work has been recognized with multiple awards, including Best Paper Award at IEEE ITSC 2021, a Paper Award at the International Applied Category Theory Conference, a Best Student Paper Finalist Award at ACC 2025 (as advisor), as well as research awards from the DoE, AFOSR, MIT, SIDARA, and Amazon.
The DARPA YFA program identifies and supports rising stars among early-career faculty, providing funding and mentorship to help them develop their research ideas in the context of national security needs. The program’s long-term goal is to foster the next generation of scientists and engineers who will dedicate significant parts of their careers to defense and security challenges.
Learn more about DARPA YFA Program.