Dr Abolfazl Zaraki is a Senior Lecturer in Robotics at the Computer Science department of the University of Hertfordshire. Before joining UH, he was a lecturer at the School of Engineering and a member of the Research Centre in AI, Robotics and Human-Machine Systems (IROHMS) at Cardiff University, Cardiff. He was the Co-chair of the Human-Like Artificial Intelligence (AI) working group and a member of the IROHMS leadership team.

He received a master's degree in mechatronics and automatic control engineering from University Technology Malaysia, Malaysia, in 2010, and a PhD degree in automatic robotic and bioengineering from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 2014. Between 2014 and 2019, he worked as Research Fellow/Senior Research Fellow at different research institutions in Italy and the UK.

In the past, Abolfazl worked on European projects EASEL (Expressive Agents for Symbiotic Education and Learning), BabyRobot - NextGen Social Robotics, JAMES (Joint Action for Multimodal Embodied Social Systems) and an Innovate UK funded project Piglet - Snake Robot Solution for Inspection in collaboration with industry.

Abolfazl's research interests include developing autonomous systems for social and industrial robotic platforms, trusted autonomy, closed-loop Human-Robot Interaction studies, and brain-computer interface (BCI) for research and assistive applications.