Dr. Zachary Cooper-Baldock is an Adjunct Research Fellow in Maritime Autonomy. He recieved his PhD in 2025 for "Rapid Flow Field Approximation via Generative Machine Learning for Underwater Vehicles" utilising advanced cGAN architectures to predict complex 3D physics in near real-time. 

He was 1-of-10 inaugural scholars inducted as part of the Australian HPC-AI Talent Program, which supported researchers undertaking large scale distributed computing and GPU acceleration for machine learning. This was supported by the Australian Government and the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI). 

He previously graduated from the University of Adelaide with a B.Eng (Hons) in Aerospace and Mechanical engineering. He is currently researching machine learning techniques to accelerate and optimise the docking of autonomous underwater vehicles operating in complex fluid domains and predict physics in 2D and 3D spaces.

Zac’s thesis is supervised by Prof. Karl Sammut, Assoc. Prof. Paulo Santos and Assoc. Prof. Russell Brinkworth. 

Zac has previously worked with both BAE Systems Australia and RUAG Aerospace within the F35 JSF program, NULKA and a range of other aerospace programs.