Romeo Ortega was born in Mexico. He obtained his BSc in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering from the National University of Mexico, Master of Engineering from Polytechnical Institute of Leningrad, USSR, and the Docteur D`Etat from the PolitechnicalInstitute of Grenoble, France in 1974, 1978 and 1984 respectively. He then joined the National University of Mexico, where he worked until1989. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois in 1987-88 and at McGill University in 1991-1992, and a Fellow of the Japan Society for Promotion of Science in 1990-1991.  

From 1992 to 2020 he was a member of the French National Research Council (CNRS) as a Directeur de Recherche in the Laboratoire de Signaux et Systemes (CentraleSupelec) in Gif-sur-Yvette, France.since June 1992.  Currently his research interests are in the fields of nonlinear and adaptive control, with special emphasis on applications.

Dr Ortega has published five books and more than 350 scientific papers in international journals, with an h-index of 83. He has supervised more than 35 PhD thesis. He is a Fellow Member of the IEEE since 1999 and an IFAC Fellow since 2016. He has served as chairman in several IFAC and IEEE committees and participated in various editorial boards of international journals. He is currently Editor in Chief of Int. J. Adaptive Control and Signal Processing and Senior Editor of Asian Journal of Control.