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, 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, Sam Burden, Eli Shlizerman, Joshua R. Smith, 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: Shwetak N. Patel, Joshua R. Smith, Matt Reynolds, Jacques Christophe Rudell, Blake Hannaford, 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

The Integrator 2025–2026

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!

UW ECE graduate student Mingfei Chen receives 2025 Google PhD Fellowship for pioneering AI research

UW ECE doctoral student Mingfei Chen has been awarded a 2025 Google PhD Fellowship in Machine Perception. This award is one of the most competitive honors for doctoral students in artificial intelligence research today.

UW ECE Entrepreneurial Fellows Program helps turn research advances into real-world products

This new program supports transfer of research into commercial products through prototyping, customer discovery, and market analysis. Learn how UW ECE-EFP fellows are translating their ideas into impact.

New study shows that electrical stimulation can reduce brain damage after stroke

In a first-of-its-kind demonstration, UW ECE and BioE Associate Professor Azadeh Yazdan and her research team have shown that applying electrical stimulation to the brain within an hour after the onset of an ischemic stroke may significantly reduce brain damage.

A distinguished career, marked by contributions to machine learning research and education

On July 5, 2025, UW ECE Professor Les Atlas officially retired and was appointed professor emeritus. Atlas has been a UW ECE professor for 41 years, making important contributions to the Department while producing groundbreaking research in machine learning and digital signal processing.

Hossein Naghavi — developing high frequency electronics for imaging, sensing, and communication

UW ECE Assistant Professor Hossein Naghavi directs the Terahertz Integrated MicroElectronics Lab at the UW, where he designs microchips that use high frequency terahertz electronics built using integrated circuit design and electromagnetics techniques.