Anastasia Bizyaeva, assistant professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University, has been named the recipient of the 2025 IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award for her publication in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. The Axelby Award is among the most prestigious honors in the field of control systems, recognizing papers that demonstrate exceptional originality, advance the theoretical foundations of control, and have significant real-world impact.
Bizyaeva received the award for her paper, “Nonlinear Opinion Dynamics with Tunable Sensitivity,” coauthored with Alessio Franci of the University of Liège and Naomi Ehrich Leonard of Princeton University, and published in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Vol. 68, No. 3, 2023. The work was selected for its contributions to understanding how individual behaviors and sensitivities shape collective decision-making—insights with broad implications for distributed systems, networked robotics, and social dynamics.
The Axelby Award committee cited the paper’s originality and its potential to influence both theoretical and applied research in control. Bizyaeva’s work advances tools for characterizing nonlinear, networked interactions, offering pathways toward more predictable and resilient distributed control systems.
“I am deeply honored that our work on Nonlinear Opinion Dynamics has been recognized with the Axelby Award,” Bizyaeva said. “This paper grew out of a wonderful collaboration with my co-authors, and I am grateful to the control systems community for recognizing its contributions. What excites me most is that the mathematical framework we developed continues to drive new research directions. Here at Cornell in the Control and Computation for Complex Systems Group, my students and I are developing new approaches to autonomous navigation and adaptive task allocation that build on the core mechanisms of fast and flexible decision-making established in this work.”
The award was presented during the CSS Awards Ceremony at the 2025 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control on Thursday, December 11, 2025.
Bizyaeva’s research exemplifies the type of high-impact, foundational work the Axelby Award was established to honor. Reviewers found it rigorous in its mathematics, far-reaching in its applications, and poised to influence next-generation approaches to complex, interconnected systems.