Michael C. Zargham, Ph.D.
CEO and Chief Engineer, Dynamical Systems Group
Engineering Institutions
Where mathematical models become operational commitments.
I engineer systems so that simple, local behavior adds up to dependable behavior of the whole. The work draws on operations research, control theory and institutional economics, and today its principal method is model-based systems engineering. The question underneath is constant: how local rules relate to global properties under the weakest workable assumptions about the actors, and what assurances should be required to underwrite an authority to operate.
My research began with distributed optimization and resource allocation in networks. It moved through generalized dynamical systems and the design of economic and institutional mechanisms, and now centers on the assurance of complex socio-technical systems. The mechanisms I design include dynamic pricing rules, voting procedures, and the incentive structures of prize competitions and engineering challenges. Since 2017 my principal institutional base has been Dynamical Systems Group, the engineering firm I founded. As its chief engineer I hold design authority for its technical work, so I answer for how our models perform once they are in use. The mathematics is the same whether the agents are robots, markets or institutions.
Trajectory
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Networked optimization and optimal control
Doctoral and postdoctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania (GRASP Laboratory; advisors Ali Jadbabaie and Alejandro Ribeiro) on fast, distributed optimization for resource allocation in networks: accelerated dual descent and distributed Newton methods for network flow and utility maximization, routing for data networks, and convex allocation of protection resources against spreading processes. From 2014 to 2017 I applied the same methods in industry, building decision systems for media operations across a portfolio of companies at Cross MediaWorks.
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Economic systems and institutions
In 2017 I founded Dynamical Systems Group to apply these methods to economic and institutional mechanisms: rules and incentives for actors whose objectives the designer does not know. With Jamsheed Shorish, during my time as an affiliated researcher at WU Vienna (2019–2023), I developed Generalized Dynamical Systems, a formalism for computational decision problems under constraints, and I originated cadCAD, the open-source simulator built on it. Most of the test cases came from emerging digital infrastructure, because that is where new mechanisms were being written into software at the time. The work covers humanitarian community currencies, pricing and incentive rules, governance of online organizations, and organizations modelled as dynamical systems.
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Systems engineering and assurance
Now I work on making engineering assurance both faster and more rigorous. Requirements declare behavioral envelopes, and every design change reruns the analyses against them and republishes the model, as continuous integration does for code. Each result keeps its declaration, execution, evidence and realization together, so anyone can reproduce it. Verification is automated, and a qualified engineer closes the loop by attesting, on the record and with rationale, whether the requirement is satisfied. The tooling is open source, built around the SysML v2 standard and OpenMBEE. I use the same methods to design and evaluate AI-enabled systems for the settings where they are deployed.
The phases build on each other. The optimization and control results are inside the incentive design and institutional economics; the incentive design and institutional economics are foundational to assuring complex systems are trusted and worthy of that trust.
Current roles
- 2017 – presentCEO and Chief Engineer, Dynamical Systems Group
- 2026 – presentMaintainer, OpenMBEE: open model-based engineering environment of NASA JPL origin
- 2021 – presentResearch Director and Board Member, Metagov: research community on digitally mediated self-governance
- 2025 – presentFellow, The European Decentralisation Institute: policy research on data and AI sovereignty
- 2022 – presentAdvisory Council Member, NumFOCUS: open practices in research, data and scientific computing
- 2026 – presentAdvisor, Humane Intelligence: evaluation of AI systems
- 2023 – presentTrustee, The Superset Trust
Ph.D. and M.S.E., Electrical and Systems Engineering, University of Pennsylvania (2014, 2010; GRASP Laboratory). B.E., Thayer School of Engineering, and A.B., Engineering Sciences, Dartmouth College (2008, 2007). Previously affiliated researcher at WU Vienna (2019–2023) and lecturer at Penn, Carnegie Mellon and IE University. Full record in the CV.