Dr. Mirko Kovac is Director of the Aerial Robotics Laboratory and Senior Lecturer in Aero-structures at Imperial College London.  His research group focusses on the development of novel, biologically inspired flying robots for distributed sensing in air and water and on autonomous robotic construction for future cities. Dr. Kovac’s particular specialisation is in robot design, hardware development and multi-modal robot mobility.

Before his appointment in London, he was post-doctoral researcher at the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory as part of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University in Cambridge, USA. He obtained his PhD with the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). He received his M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) in 2005. During his studies he was research associate with the University of California in Berkeley USA, RIETER Automotive Switzerland, the WARTSILA Diesel Technology Division in Switzerland, and CISERV in Singapore.

Since 2006, he has presented his work at numerous international conferences and in journals and has won several best paper and best presentation awards. He is also founding member of several robotics initiatives, including the London Robotics Network that acts as the community building hub in the larger London area for robotics in academia, government and industry. He has also been invited lecturer and keynote speaker at more than 30 research institutions world wide and has been representative speaker on education and innovation at the World Knowledge Dialogue Symposium 2008, the EPFL Didactic Days Conference 2008 and the London Innovation Summit 2014.