Rate My Professor Matt Zucker

Matt Zucker is a full Professor of Engineering at Swarthmore College, where he joined in 2010 as an Assistant Professor, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2016, served as Engineering Department Chair from 2018 to 2024, and advanced to full Professor in 2025. He is currently on sabbatical leave for the 2025-2026 academic year. Zucker holds a B.A. in Cognitive Science with honors from Vassar College, conferred in 2002, and a Ph.D. in Robotics from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, conferred in 2011. His doctoral dissertation, "Learning and Optimization Methods for High Level Planning," was supervised by James Kuffner, Chris Atkeson, J. Andrew Bagnell, and Jean-Claude Latombe. Before entering academia, he spent five years at Bluefin Robotics in Cambridge, MA, rising from intern to Senior Software Engineer, where he developed software for autonomous underwater vehicles, including mission planning tools, diagnostics, data analysis, and inter-process communications systems. Zucker has also held roles such as Scholar in Residence at Lumafield since 2025, developing software for geometric primitives in volumetric data; co-founder of FlySorter LLC from 2014 to 2020, creating machine learning for Drosophila classification; and consultant positions at Groundlight AI, SEEGRID Corp., and Rep Invariant Systems.

Zucker's research focuses on robotics, encompassing motion planning, machine learning, numerical optimization, navigation, manipulation, obstacle avoidance, dynamic simulation, computer vision, computer graphics, laboratory automation, rapid prototyping, and CNC machining. He has led funded projects including the DARPA Robotics Challenge (2012-2014) for humanoid disaster response behaviors, NIH Phase I SBIR with FlySorter LLC (2017-2019) for automated Drosophila sorting, DARPA Learning Locomotion (2007-2009), and NIST Standard Reference Data (1998-2000). Notable publications include "CHOMP: Covariant Hamiltonian Optimization and Motion Planning" (International Journal of Robotics Research, 2013, with Nathan Ratliff et al.), "Optimization and Learning for Rough-Terrain Legged Locomotion" (IJRR, 2011, with Nathan Ratliff et al.), "A general-purpose system for teleoperation of the DRC-HUBO humanoid robot" (Journal of Field Robotics, 2015), and "Cube-to-sphere projections for procedural texturing and beyond" (Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques, 2018, with Yosuke Higashi). His scholarship has garnered over 6,000 citations on Google Scholar. At Swarthmore, he teaches courses such as Mobile Robotics, Computer Vision, Introduction to Engineering Design, Computer-Aided Manufacturing, and Linear Physical Systems Analysis labs. Zucker is a member of Sigma Xi (inducted 2011) and Psi Chi (2002), and co-authored an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer (2025) on executive orders impacting scientific research.