Munzir Zafar
Education
- Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA (May 2019, GPA 3.49/4.0) — Thesis: Whole-Body Control of Wheeled Inverted Pendulum Humanoids; Committee: Dr. Evangelos Theodorou, Dr. Henrik Christensen, Dr. Byron Boots, Dr. Seth Hutchinson, Dr. Justin Romberg
- M.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology (May 2013, GPA 3.47/4.0)
- B.E. in Electronics (Gold Medalist, 1st Position/50 students, GPA 3.98/4.0), National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Pakistan (Dec 2007)
Research Interests
- Whole-body and hierarchical control of humanoid robots; robotic manipulation; model-based and learning-based control under uncertainty; industrial automation and applied robotics.
Biography
Dr. Munzir Zafar has been Assistant Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Habib University since January 2023. He also directs Takhleeq, Habib’s innovation and industry-collaboration hub, since October 2024 — leading interdisciplinary R&D initiatives including an autonomous tow truck with Toyota Pakistan, a solar-panel-cleaning robot with Unilever Pakistan, and locally built industrial robotic manipulators with Toyota and Dawlance. He previously served as Academic Director of Habib’s Graduate School Curation Program (GSCP) (September 2023–December 2024).
Before returning to academia, Dr. Zafar spent over two years (2019–2022) as a Senior Systems Engineer at Ethicon (Johnson & Johnson Health Care Systems), Robotics and Digital Solutions, Santa Clara, CA, where he worked on interaction-sensing and external-force estimation for a state-of-the-art digital surgical robotics platform, leading cross-functional design of robotic control subsystems. He completed his Ph.D. at Georgia Tech’s Humanoids Lab (2013–2019), single-handedly developing and maintaining the full software/hardware stack for Golem Krang, a 150kg bi-manual wheeled inverted pendulum humanoid, and deriving novel whole-body control algorithms. Earlier in his career, he was Senior R&D Engineer at Saltec Powerlink, Karachi (2008–2010), where he was promoted within six months to lead the R&D department and took two telecom power-management products from conception to deployment.
Dr. Zafar is a Fulbright Scholar (2010) and Gold Medalist in Electronics Engineering. At Habib, he has designed and taught courses in Engineering, Design and Innovation, Systems Engineering and Project Management, and Computer Architecture, and continues to advise industrial automation and robotics capstone projects.
Selected Publications
- Wingo, B., Cheng, C. A., Murtaza, M. A., Zafar, M., and Hutchinson, S. “Extending Riemannian Motion Policies to Underactuated Systems.” ICRA, 2020.
- Khan, M., Zafar, M., and Chatterjee, A. “Barrier Functions in Cascaded Controller: Safe Quadrotor Control.” American Control Conference (ACC), 2020.
- Zafar, M., Hutchinson, S., and Theodorou, E. A. “Hierarchical Optimization for Whole-Body Control of Wheeled Inverted Pendulum Humanoids.” ICRA, 2019.
- Zafar, M., Mehmood, A., Khan, M., et al. “Semi-Parametric Approaches to Learning in Model-Based Hierarchical Control of Complex Systems.” International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER), 2018.
- Zafar, M., and Christensen, H. “Whole-Body Control of Wheeled Inverted Pendulum Humanoids.” IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids), 2016.
Honors & Awards
- Fulbright Scholarship (2010) — fully funded Ph.D. at Georgia Tech
- Hakim Mohammad Saeed Scholarship (undergraduate, consistent outstanding performance)
- Gold Medalist, B.E. Electronics, NUST-PNEC
- 1st Prize, National Engineering and Technology Competition, FAST-NU Karachi, 2007
Explore More DSSE Faculty Profiles
A
Program Director, Integrated Sciences and Mathematics and Assistant Professor
BS Integrated Sciences and Mathematics
B
F
H
Faculty Director, Dean's Fellowship Program and Assistant Professor
BS Integrated Sciences and Mathematics
I
Associate Dean Academic Systems and Registrar and Associate Professor.
BS Computer Engineering, BS Electrical Engineering
J
M
Interim Vice President Academic Affairs and Professor
BS Computer Engineering, BS Electrical Engineering
Faculty Director, Academic Planning and Governance and Associate Professor
BS Computer Science
N
Program Director, Electrical and Computer Engineering and Associate Professor
BS Computer Engineering, BS Electrical Engineering