**About the Special Issue Editors**

**Sergio Saponara** is an Italian scientist, engineer and entrepreneur, active in the fields of electronics and automotive engineering. He is Full Professor of Electronics at the University of Pisa, Italy, where he is also President of the BSc and MSc degrees in Electronic Engineering. He got his Master and Ph.D. degrees cum laude in Electronic Engineering in 1999 and 2003, respectively. He started his research activities in the field of electronics in 1999, first with a research grant from the National Research Council, and then a grant from STMicroelectronics. In 2002, he was a Marie Curie Research Fellow at IMEC, Belgium, Leuven. Since 2005, he has been responsible for the teaching of courses in Automotive Electronics and Electronic Systems for Robotics and Automation at the University of Pisa, where he contributed to the foundation of the MSc degree in Cybersecurity, being responsible for HW and Embedded Security. Since 1999, he has also taught Electronics at the Italian Naval Academy. As an entrepreneur, he co-founded the company IngeniArs in 2014, and is the winner of several innovation prizes, such as the H2020 SME Instrument. He founded the Summer School in Enabling Technologies for Industrial IoT in 2016, and is also its director. The organisation was awarded by the IEEE CAS society in 2017 and 2018. In 2020, he was appointed director of the Automotive Electronics and Powertrain Electrifications specialization course for retraining in the field of vehicle electrification for the Vitesco Technologies (Continental) group. He co-organized more than 150 conferences and he is Associate Editor of the journals *Energies, Sensors, Designs, IEE Electronic Letters, SpringerNature Journal of Real Time Image Processing, IEEE Canadian Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering, IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine* and *IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine*. He currently coordinates for the University of Pisa in the H2020 European Processor Initiative, where he is WP leader for security HW implementation and a member elected of the steering committee. He also has on-going projects with MIT relating to power converters and e-drives for electric/hybrid vehicles. He has co-authored about 300 scientific articles, four books, 10 journal special issues, and 20 patents. In technology transfer, he has collaborated with Magneti Marelli, STMicroelectronics, Renesas, Intel, Huawei, Infineon, Ericsson, P2P, Solari, Trenitalia, AMS, RiCo, INTECS, IDS, Sitael and Leonardo. He has worked as an evaluator for scientific projects for the governments of Italy, Romania, Kazakhstan and the European Commission. He has been selected as an expert for the AI4people initiative of the European Institute for Science Media and Democracy.

**Lucian Mihet-Popa** received his Habilitation (2015) and Ph.D. degree (2002) in Electrical Engineering, a Master's degree (2000) in Electric Drives and Power Electronics and a Bachelor's degree (1999) in Electrical Engineering, from the Politehnica University of Timisoara-Romania. Since 2016, he has worked as Full Professor in Energy Technology at Oestfold University College in Norway. From 1999 to 2016, Professor Mihet-Popa has been with the Politehnica University of Timisoara, Romania. He has also worked as a Research Scientist with the Danish Technical University (2011–2014) and Aalborg University (2000–2002) in Denmark and as a Post Doc with Siegen University in Germany in 2004. Dr. Lucian Mihet-Popa has published more than 120 papers in national and international journals and conference proceedings, and 10 books. Since 2017, he has been a Guest Editor for five Special Issues for the MDPI Energies and Applied Sciences Journals, for Maljesi and for the Advances in Meteorology Journal. He has served as Scientific and Technical Programme Committee Member for many IEEE Conferences. Professor Mihet-Popa has participated in more than 15 international grants/projects, such as FP7, EEA and Horizon 2020, and has been awarded more than 10 national research grants. He is also the head of the Research Lab "Intelligent Control of Energy Conversion and Storage Systems" and is one of the Coordinators of the Master Program in "Green Energy Technology" at the Faculty of Engineering. His research interest include modelling, simulation, control and testing of Energy Conversion Systems, Distributed Energy Resources (DER) components and systems, including battery storage systems-BSS (for electric vehicles and hybrid cars and vanadium redox batteries (VRB)), energy efficiency in smart buildings and smart grids. Professor Mihet-Popa was invited to join the Energy and Automotive committees by the President and the Honorary President of Atomium European Institute, working in close cooperation with—and under the umbrella—of the EC and EU Parliament, and he was appointed the Chairman of AI4People 2020, Energy Section.
