Gianluigi Pillonetto was born in Montebelluna, Italy, on January 21, 1975. He received the Laurea degree in Computer Science Engineering cum laude from the University of Padova, Italy, in 1998. In 1999 he was selected as one of 5 students out of 147 applicants to receive a Research Assistantship from the Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Washington University, St Louis, USA. He declined such award by opting for the Ph.D. program in Bioengineering, jointly given by the Polytechnic of Milan and the Dept. of Information Engineering of Padova. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in Biomedical Engineering from the Polytechnic of Milan, Italy, in 2002, discussing the thesis entitled "Bayesian approaches to parameter estimation of physiological systems". In 2003 he obtained the “Paolo Durst 2003 award” from the Italian National Group of Bioengineering for the best Italian Ph.D. thesis in Bioengineering. In 2000 and 2002 he respectively was Visiting Scholar and Visiting Scientist at Applied Physics Laboratory and Department of Bioengineering of the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. From June 2002 to November 2005 he has been a post-doc fellow at the Department of Information Engineering of University of Padova. In 2005 he became Assistant Professor of Control and Dynamic Systems at the Department of Information engineering, University of Padova. Since 2014 he has been Associate Professor at the same department. His current scientific interests include system identification, machine learning, biomedical systems modelling and control. On these subjects in the last 16 years, Gianluigi Pillonetto has published 60 papers (48 of them without his Ph.D. advisor) in the most important peer-reviewed international journals of Control Systems, Machine Learning, Applied Mathematics and Bioengineering. In particular, he has published 28 papers in Automatica and 6 in IEEE Transactions of Automatic Control, the two most important Automatic Control Journals. Other publications can also be found in IEEE Trans. On Biomedical Engineering, SIAM journal on Control and Optimization, IEEE Trans. On Neural Networks and Learning Systems, IEEE Trans. On Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Journal of Machine Learning Research.
Since 2005 he was co-investigator in 4 PRIN and 1 FIRB research projects on estimation and system identification. He was Principal Investigator for 2015 Progetto di Ateneo "New statistical learning approach for multi-agents adaptive estimation and coverage control", University of Padova Research Funding, 40K Euro.
He has been an Associated Editor for Automatica since 2014. He had been also Associate Editor of Systems and Control Letters (Elsevier) from 2013 to 2016. He was nominated Outstanding Reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control in 2012 and Outstanding Reviewer for Automatica in 2007 (award given to 25 persons out of almost 1300).
Gianluigi Pillonetto has been awarded of the 2017 Automatica Prize. This award is assigned every three years for outstanding contributions to the theory and/or practice of control engineering/science, documented in a paper published in the IFAC Journal Automatica. The title of the work was “G. Pillonetto, A new kernel-based approach to hybrid system identification”, and was selected within the papers published in the years 2014-2016. He has been also nominated 2018 Plenary Speaker at the IFAC Symposium on System Identification 2018. He is IEEE Fellow since 2020.

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