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

The programmability of biology

Engineering a toolbox of synthetic biological parts to create new living systems

With new ‘shuffling’ trick, researchers can measure gene activity in single cells

A team led by Georg Seelig has developed an innovative approach to reliably track gene activity in a tissue down to the level of single cells.

The 2017 Research Review Day

UW EE hosted its first annual Research Review Day. Industry partners joined University of Washington faculty and students to discuss top research in the field of electrical engineering.

Dr. Joshua Smith becomes Milton and Delia Zeutschel Professor for Entrepreneurial Excellence

The new professorship was established through a generous gift from UW EE alum Milton Zeutschel (BSEE '60) and his wife Delia Zeutschel (BA '58) to recruit and retain entrepreneurially-driven faculty.

UW launches Institute for Nano-Engineered Systems

The Institute for Nano-Engineered Systems (NanoEs) will pursue impactful advancements in a variety of disciplines — including energy, materials science, computation and medicine. It is housed in a new, multimillion-dollar facility on the UW’s Seattle campus and led by UW EE Professor Karl Böhringer.

Professor Smith discusses how the IoT will change our daily lives

UW EE Professor Joshua Smith speaks with NBC News on how the Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming the way we communicate with the world around us.