Rate My Professor Surya Nurzaman

Surya G. Nurzaman is an Associate Professor in the School of Engineering at Monash University Malaysia. His research specializations encompass soft robotics, bio-inspired robotics, embodied intelligence, dynamical systems, and machine learning, contributing to UN Sustainable Development Goals such as Good Health and Well-being, Affordable and Clean Energy, and Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure. Nurzaman earned his PhD in Robotics from Osaka University, Japan, in 2011, supported by the Monbukagakusho scholarship from the Japanese government. He completed his Bachelor and Master degrees at the Institute of Technology Bandung, Indonesia. Prior to his doctoral studies, he served as a technology consultant at Accenture, managing projects across Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and the United States. From 2011 to 2015, he held Research Fellow positions at Osaka University, ETH Zürich in Switzerland, and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom before joining Monash University in 2015.

Nurzaman's career at Monash has been marked by significant achievements, including the ITEX 2021 Gold Medal and the 2024 School of Engineering Award for Excellence in Research in the Open Category. He has authored over fifty publications in peer-reviewed journals and conferences, along with book chapters and a dedicated book on soft material robotics. Key publications include 'Automatic differentiation of voluntary and tremulous motion using ensemble empirical mode decomposition and convolutional Bi-directional LSTM' (2025, Scientific Reports), 'GripDepthSense3DNet: A Depth-Enabled Hardness Sensing Framework in Soft Robotic Grasping' (2025, Soft Robotics), 'Parkinson's disease tremor prediction towards real-time suppression: A self-attention deep temporal convolutional network approach' (2025, Computers in Biology and Medicine), and 'Action tremor features discovery for essential tremor and Parkinson's disease with explainable multilayer BiLSTM' (2024, Computers in Biology and Medicine). As Editor-in-Chief of Robotics Reports since 2023, he previously served as Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine (2021-2023) and Frontiers in Robotics and AI (2021-present). Nurzaman has organized international workshops on soft robotics and morphological computation, including at Monte Verita, Switzerland (2013) and IEEE ICRA (2017), and delivered invited talks at RSS and IEEE ICRA workshops, universities, and research institutions in Denmark, Germany, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Singapore.