EEE celebrates academic promotions: Dr Giordano Scarciotti

Giordano champions modern approaches to teaching that proved extremely valuable during the pandemic.

Six academic staff from our department have received promotions in the College's annual promotions round. Today we meet Dr Giordano Scarciotti.

Dr Giordano Scarciotti, promoted to Senior Lecturer

"I joined Imperial College in 2012 as a PhD student, after graduating from the University of Rome Tor Vergata. I subsequently received a Junior Research Fellowship that enabled me to start my independent research and helped me to become a lecturer in 2017.

My research focuses on complexity reduction and control of uncertain systems. These are both very important practical problems. Nowadays any technological system relies on the availability of mathematical models. Among these, some are very complex, such us the power grid that brings electricity to our houses, or the atmospheric models that are used to predict tomorrow's weather. These complex models are difficult to study, and predictions could require too many resources to be made in time. My research explores techniques to reduce the complexity of these models while maintaining the same behaviour, thus allowing timely and accurate predictions.

I have been building up my research group and international collaborations — I'm currently collaborating with the Centre for Ocean Energy Research at Maynooth University on the topic of optimal control of wave energy converters, and with the Dynamics and Control group at Eindhoven University of Technology on model reduction of complex systems.

Giordano with 2nd Year Electronic Design Project students on demonstration day (photograph taken pre-pandemic)

Since becoming a lecturer, I have championed a modern approach to teaching which naturally incorporates the use of recorded lectures, and I adopted a Team-Based Learning approach. TBL is a teaching “add-on” for the "flipped classroom"— when lectures are pre-recorded and watched before class. It has two aims: to ensure that students come to class prepared, and to enable students to learn as a team how to apply the course concepts to solve interesting, authentic, complex problems.

Thanks to this approach there was virtually no disruption to my teaching due the pandemic and students were very enthusiastic about being able to interact with their peers for the full length of the course."

Our congratulations to Giordano — and to all our staff on their recent promotions — from everyone in the EEE Community!