Sebastian Engell received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering from Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany in 1978 and the Dr.-Ing. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Duisburg University, Germany in 1981 for a thesis on the relationship between information theory and optimal filtering. 1984/85 he spent a year at McGill University, Montréal. In 1987, he received the venia legendi from Duisburg University for a monograph on the limits of the performance of linear control systems.

From 1986 to 1990 he was a group leader at Fraunhofer Institut IITB, Karlsruhe, Germany, responsible for process automation and production scheduling. 1990 he was appointed as Full Professor of Process Dynamics and Control in the Department of Biochemical and Chemical Engineering at TU Dortmund, Germany. 2002-2006 he served as Vice-Rector for Research and International Relations of TU Dortmund. He led several EU-funded projects, including a project which defined a roadmap in Cyber-physical Systems of Systems and the project CoPro – Improved energy and resource efficiency by better coordination of production in the process industries. Up to now, 86 young scientists under his supervision obtained a doctoral degree at TU Dortmund.

Sebastian Engell was appointed Fellow of IFAC in 2006. He received an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant in 2016 for the project MOBOCON (Model-based optimizing control – from a vision to industrial reality) and Best Paper Awards from Journal of Process Control and Computers and Chemical Engineering. In 2021, he received the Arnold Eucken Medal from the German Association of Process Engineering for his impact on the theory and practice of process control. His interests span a broad range in the field of process system engineering, including process control, real-time optimization, distributed optimization, scheduling, and optimization-based process design. A pertinent topic in his work has been how to handle uncertainty in control and optimization.