Michel Verhaegen received an engineering degree in aeronautics from the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, in 1982, and the doctoral degree in applied sciences from the Catholic University Leuven, Belgium, in 1985. From 1985 to 1994 he has been a research fellow of the U.S. National Research Council (NRC) and the Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences. In the period 1994-1999 he was an Associate Professor of the control laboratory of the Delft University of Technology and became a full professor at the faculty of Applied Physics of the University of Twente in the Netherlands in 1999. From 2001 on he moved back to the University of Delft and joined the Delft Center for Systems and Control. His main research directions include system identification, distributed and fault tolerant control, and data driven controller design methodologies. Application areas include control for high resolution imaging and wind energy. In 2014 he was a recipient of an advanced ERC grant.