Yongxin Chen was born in Ganzhou, Jiangxi, China. He received his BSc in Mechanical Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong university, China, in 2011, and a Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering, under the supervision of Tryphon Georgiou, from University of Minnesota in 2016. He is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Before joining Georgia Tech, he had a one-year Research Fellowship in the Department of Medical Physics at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center with Allen Tannenbaum from 2016 to 2017 and was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University from 2017 to 2018. He received the George S. Axelby Best Paper Award (IEEE Transaction on Automatic Control) in 2017 for his joint work ‘‘Optimal steering of a linear stochastic system to a final probability distribution, Part I’’ with Tryphon Georgiou and Michele Pavon and the SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization Best Paper Award in 2023. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2020, the Simons-Berkeley research fellowship in 2021, the A.V. ‘Bal’ Balakrishnan Award in 2021, and the Donald P. Eckman Award in 2022. He delivered a plenary talk at the 2023 American Control Conference.

He has conducted researches in stochastic control, optimal transport, robotics, optimization, generative modeling, and sampling. His current research focuses on the intersection between control, machine learning and robotics with the goal to develop theoretical foundations and algorithms for robots so that they are able to accomplish complex tasks autonomously and reliably.