Biosystems

Overview

Biosystems research in UW’s Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering is a highly collaborative endeavor. Our faculty focus on four areas of Biosystems research: synthetic & systems biology, neural engineering, biomedical devices, and mobile health. Many of our faculty hold secondary appointments and work closely with collaborators from other departments including Bioengineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Biology, Genome Sciences, Applied Mathematics, and the UW Medical Center. Our Biosystems faculty work with many cross-disciplinary institutes such as the eScience Institute, the NSF Engineering Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering, the Institute for Protein Design, the Bloedel Hearing Research Center and the University of Washington Institute for Neuroengineering.

Topics

Synthetic Biology

Biotechnology, macromolecular engineering tools, advanced materials, genetic engineering, computer aided design, laboratory automation, DNA/RNA sequence assembly, information theory and machine learning for genomics applications.

Faculty: Eric Klavins, Georg Seelig, Sreeram Kannan, Jeff Bilmes

Neural Engineering

Neural Control, Brain-Computer Interfaces, Neural Security, Device control, spinal cord rehabilitation, neural signaling, neuromechanics and computational neuroscience.

Faculty: Blake Hannaford, Howard Jay Chizeck, Sam Burden, Eli Shlizerman, Joshua R. Smith, Visvesh Sathe, Azadeh Yazdan-Shamorad, Amy Orsborn, Chet Moritz

Medical Devices

Design of biomedical devices including research and clinical neural interfaces, diagnostic devices, wearable sensors, and embedded processing and wireless communication links for biomedical devices.

Faculty: Babak Parviz, Shwetak N. Patel, Joshua R. Smith, Matt Reynolds, Visvesh Sathe, Jacques Christophe Rudell, Blake Hannaford, Howard Jay Chizeck, Les Atlas, Azadeh Yazdan-Shamorad, Amy Orsborn, Chet Moritz

Mobile Health

Development of new health monitoring, diagnostics, and health management applications and tools using emerging mobile devices and sensors. Research in this area applies advances in imaging, app development, physiological modeling, statistical algorithms, and machine learning. This work has implications for home health monitoring and low-resource environments.

Faculty: Shwetak N. Patel, Joshua R. Smith, Matt Reynolds, Linda G. Shapiro

Latest News

UW ECE welcomes six new faculty members

Beginning this fall and extending through autumn quarter 2025, UW ECE is welcoming six new faculty members who will bring a wide breadth of knowledge and technical expertise to the Department.

Congratulations to the 2024 UW ECE Awards recipients!

The UW ECE Awards recognize exceptional teaching, research, and entrepreneurship efforts in the Department as well as outstanding mentorship, student impact, and collaborative work.

Amy Orsborn receives NSF CAREER award to study how the brain responds to using neural interfaces

UW ECE and BioE Assistant Professor Amy Orsborn was recently named a recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, one of the most prestigious awards in the nation for early-career faculty.

‘The best chance for the biggest impact’: Shwetak Patel inducted into SIGCHI Academy for advancing health, sustainability and interaction research

UW ECE and Allen School Professor Shwetak Patel was recently inducted into the SIGCHI Academy for his contributions in health, sustainability and interaction research. Patel explores how technology can be incorporated with medicine that utilizes sustainable resources.

Device restores hand function for some with spinal injury

UW ECE Professor Chet Moritz is leading groundbreaking research enabling some people with paralysis to regain hand strength and function via electrical stimulation to the spine.

UPWARDS for the Future

The University of Washington is at the forefront of an international effort to innovate the semiconductor industry while building a skilled U.S.-based workforce to design and manufacture chip technology. UW ECE and Physics Professor Mo Li is leading the UW's contribution to this effort.