Patricio Vela was born in Mexico City, Mexico and grew up in California. He earned his bachelor of science degree in 1998 and his doctorate in 2003 at the California Institute of Technology, where he did his graduate research on geometric nonlinear control and robotics. Dr. Vela came to Georgia Tech as a post-doctoral researcher in controlled active vision and joined the ECE faculty in 2005.

His research interests lie in the geometric perspectives to control theory and computer vision. Recently, he has been interested in the role that computer vision can play for achieving control-theoretic objectives of (semi-)autonomous systems, such as localization, mapping, navigation, and manipulation. He also investigates adaptive control of nonlinear systems enhanced by machine learning.