Nelson, Bradley, Prof.

Multi-Scale and Robotics Lab (Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems)

 

Areas of Interest:

• Robotics, Systems and Control
• Micro and Nano Systems and Processes
• Medical Engineering

Biography
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Brad Nelson is the Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zürich and is the founder of the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems where he leads the Multi-Scale Robotics Lab. His primary research direction lies in extending robotics research into emerging areas of science and engineering. His current research is in microrobotics, biomicrorobotics, and nanorobotics, including efforts in robotic micromanipulation, microassembly, MEMS (sensors and actuators), mechanical manipulation of biological cells and tissue, nanofabrication and NanoElectroMechanical Systems (NEMS).

Prof. Nelson received a B.S. (Mechanical Engineering) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984, an M.S. (Mechanical Engineering) from the University of Minnesota in 1987, and the Ph.D. degree in Robotics (School of Computer Science) from Carnegie Mellon University in 1995. During these years he also worked as an engineer at Honeywell and Motorola, and served as a United States Peace Corps Volunteer in Botswana, Africa. In 1995 he became Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota in 1998, and Professor at ETH in 2002.

He has received a number of major awards and honors and was named to the Scientific American 50, Scientific American magazine's annual list recognizing fifty outstanding acts of leadership in science and technology. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the ASME. He has won over a dozen best paper awards at major robotics conferences and journals. Professor Nelson serves on or has been a member of more than ten editorial boards, has chaired several international workshops and conferences, has served as the head of the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, the Chairman of the ETH Electron Microscopy Center (EMEZ), and is a member of the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation.