Miguel Olivares-Mendez is an assistant professor at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) at the University of Luxembourg. He leads the Space Robotics department.

In 2006, he obtained his Computing Engineer diploma at the University of Malaga (UMA), in Spain, then a master’s degree in robotics and automation in 2009 and in 2013 a doctorate in robotics and automation at the faculty of industrial engineering at the Technical University of Madrid (UPM), in Spain. In 2013, he won the prize for the best doctoral thesis awarded by the European Society for Fuzzy Logic and Technology (EUSFLAT).

In May 2013, he joined the SnT at the University of Luxembourg as an associate researcher in the automation and robotics research group. In December 2016, he became a researcher with overall responsibility for research activities into mobile robotics in the Automation & Robotics research group at SnT – University of Luxembourg.

In 2019, he was named professor of space robotics at the University of Luxembourg and in 2020 he founded the research group Space Robotics (SpaceR) at SnT – University of Luxembourg. The SpaceR group, which currently consists of 22 members, has received 3.5 million euros in financed projects and industrial collaborations. Over the course of its first year and a half as the head of the SpaceR group, Miguel Olivares-Mendez imagined, constructed and implemented two facilities linked to space: the LunaLab and the Zero-G Lab.