Markos Papageorgiou was born in Thessaloniki, Greece, in 1953. He received the Diplom-Ingenieur and Doktor-Ingenieur (honors) degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, in 1976 and 1981, respectively.

In 1988-1994 he was a Professor of Automation at the Technical University of Munich. Since 1994 he has been a Professor and Director of the Dynamic Systems and Simulation Laboratory at the Technical University of Crete, Greece. He was a Visiting Professor at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, (1982), at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, Paris, (1985-1987), and at MIT, Cambridge (1997, 2000); and a Visiting Scholar at INRETS, Paris, (1986-1988), University of Minnesota (1991, 1993), University of Southern California (1993) and the University of California, Berkeley (1993, 1997, 2000).

He is the author of the books Applications of Automatic Control Concepts to Traffic Flow Modeling and Control (Springer, 1983) and Optimierung (R. Oldenbourg, 1991; 1996), and the editor of the Concise Encyclopedia of Traffic and Transportation Systems (Pergamon Press, 1991). He is the author or co-author of over 170 technical papers. His research interests include automatic control, optimisation, and their application to traffic and transportation systems and water networks. He is an Associate Editor of Transportation Research-Part C and the Chairman of the IFAC Technical Committee on Transportation Systems.

Prof. Papageorgiou was awarded the 1983 Eugen-Hartmann prize from the Union of German Engineers and received a Fulbright Research and Lecturing award (1997). Prof. Papageorgiou is a Fellow of the IEEE.