Prof. Dr. Bradley Nelson

Brad Nelson has been the Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zürich since 2002.

He received the B.S. degree in Mechancial Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Minnesota. He has worked as an engineer at Honeywell and Motorola and served as a United States Peace Corps Volunteer in Botswana, Africa, before obtaining a Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1995. He was an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (1995-1998) and an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota (1998-2002).

Prof. Nelson’s primary research focus is on microrobotics and nanorobotics emphasizing applications in biology and medicine, particularly medical robotics. He has received a number of awards and more than a dozen Best Paper Awards at major robotics conferences and journals. He is a Fellow of IEEE and ASME and serves on the editorial boards of several journals. He has chaired several international workshops and conferences, has served as the Head of the ETH Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, the Chairman of the ETH Electron Microscopy Center (EMEZ), and as a member of the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation.