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It is with deep regret that we inform you,
that on November 11, 2023,
Prof. Ph.D. engineer Krzysztof Gałkowski passed away.

Prof. Ph.D. engineer Krzysztof Gałkowski

He was a native of Wrocław, Poland. He began his academic career in the Institute of Technical Cybernetics at the Faculty of Electronics of the Wrocław University of Science and Technology. In 1996, he moved to Zielona Góra to the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the College of Engineering (currently the University of Zielona Góra). In 2002, he obtained the title of professor of technical sciences. From 2003-2021, he was also a Professor at the Institute of Physics and Institute of Technical Sciences at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland. He spent three one-year appointments as a Gerard Mercator visiting professor (funded by DFG, the German national science foundation) at The University of Wuppertal, Germany, in the institute of Professor Anton Kummert and also held various other visiting positions, notably as a visiting professor, since March 2000, in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK.

His area of research for most of his career was the analysis and control of multidimensional systems, from theory to applications. In 1994, he began collaborative research with Professor Eric Rogers, University of Southampton, UK, and (in the early years) Professor David Owens from the University of Sheffield, UK, which was extremely active over the years and continued until his death. The subject area was repetitive processes, a particular class of multidimensional systems with industrial applications. After developing a stability and stabilization theory for these processes, much productive research followed on applying this theory to iterative learning control, which has applications in many areas, ranging from industrial robotics to additive manufacturing and robotic-assisted stroke rehabilitation. In 2010, the first paper on experimental validation of these designs was reported due to collaboration with Krzysztofs Ph.D. student Łukasz Hładowski and colleagues in Southampton.

After a period of collaboration with colleagues from Belarus, an extensive and continuing collaboration with Pavel Pakshin and Julia Emelianova from Arzamas Polytechnic Institute of R.E. Alekseev Nizhny Novgorod State Technical University, Russia, began on control theory for nonlinear repetitive processes. In the most recent publication, this theory was applied to iterative learning control design for systems with saturation and experimentally validated by Sławomir Mandra from Toruń.

Krzysztof was also an excellent PhD supervisor and among his students Wojciech Paszke, Bartłomiej Sulikowski, Łukasz Hładowski and Artur Gramacki are faculty colleagues in Zielona Góra. He also made many contributions through plenary lectures at international conferences. In particular, he founded the international workshop series NDS, held biannually from 1998, to form a focus for researchers in the area, which extends across many disciplines of which control is just one.

Away from his research and teaching, Krzysztof enjoyed hobbies such as collecting mushrooms during the season in Poland and preserving them for eating over the winter, and sightseeing on international trips, with particular emphasis on religious buildings and castles. By far his major interest, however, was his family, wife Ewa, son Philip, daughter Agata and, in later years, his two grandchildren of whom he was very proud. It is there that he will be most missed.

Eric Rogers
Pavel Pakshin
Anton Kummert
Bartłomiej Sulikowski
Wojciech Paszke

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