The Integrator 2024–2025
Read the latest issue of The Integrator, UW ECE’s flagship annual magazine highlighting the Department’s extraordinary faculty and student research, achievements, alumni stories, special events and more from this past year!
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
Kim Ingraham — engineering assistive robotic devices for people with disabilities
UW ECE Assistant Professor Kim Ingraham designs personalized, adaptive control strategies for assistive robotic devices, such as exoskeletons and powered wheelchairs. Her work brings people together from different backgrounds to produce more usable assistive robotic devices.
A new, 3D-imaging system for early detection of lung cancer
UW ECE Assistant Professor Sajjad Moazeni and graduate students in his lab are part of a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional research team developing a new, three-dimensional imaging system for early detection of lung cancer.
Designing next-generation chips at UW ECE
UW ECE faculty are leaders in microchip design and are known internationally for their creative, interdisciplinary approaches to chip design and development.
UW ECE is Hiring!
UW ECE is inviting applications for tenure-track associate and assistant professor positions.
The need for speed — Sajjad Moazeni receives NSF grant to develop a new kind of optical interconnect for data centers supporting AI and machine learning in the cloud
UW ECE Assistant Professor Sajjad Moazeni has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop an optical interconnect that will be fast, compact, and energy efficient.
Researchers
- Anna Kuchina
- Hossein Naghavi
- Sep Makhsous
- Andrea Fanelli
- Sajjad Moazeni
- Chet Moritz
- Amy Orsborn
- Azadeh Yazdan-Shahmorad
- Visvesh Sathe
- Georg Seelig
- Chris Rudell
- Eli Shlizerman
- Shwetak N. Patel
- Matt Reynolds
- Joshua R. Smith
- Babak Parviz
- C. J. Richard Shi
- Linda G. Shapiro
- Eric Klavins
- Blake Hannaford
- Howard Jay Chizeck
- Samuel Burden
- Jeffrey A. Bilmes
- Les Atlas
Research Labs
- Terahertz Integrated MicroElectronics (TIME) Lab
- NERD LAB: NEURAL ENGINEERING AND REHABILITATION DESIGN
- Emerging integrated technologies & systems (EMiT) Lab
- Restorative Technologies Laboratory
- Orsborn Lab
- Processing Systems Lab (PSyLab)
- AMP Lab
- Data-Driven Dynamical Systems
- Seelig lab for synthetic biology
- Sensor Systems Lab
- Ubicomp (Ubiquitous Computing) Research Lab
- Klavins Lab
- BioRobotics Laboratory
- Information Theory Lab
- Interactive System Design Laboratory
Latest Projects
- Stroke neurorehabilitation using optogenetic stimulation in non-human primates
- Multi-modal large-scale optogenetic interface for non-human primates
- Develop and test a practical stroke model in non-human primates
- Studying the underlying mechanisms of post-stroke cognitive impairment
- UW BIOFAB: a cloud laboratory for genetic engineering
- Digital Pathology: Accuracy, Viewing Behavior and Image Characterization (with PI: Joann Elmore at Harborview and others)
Representative Publications
- Now is the critical time for Engineered Neuroplasticity
- Transcutaneous electrical spinal stimulation promotes long-term recovery of upper extremity functions in chronic tetraplegia
- Optogenetic surface stimulation of the rat cervical spinal cord
- Automated Center-out Rodent Behavioral Trainer (ACRoBaT), a fully automated device for training rats to perform a center out task