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

James Rosenthal receives Yang Research Award

UW ECE congratulates recent graduate James Rosenthal, who was named as the 2021 Yang Research Award recipient for his work developing neurotechnology.

The Integrator 2021 - Focus on Impact - now available!

Read this year's issue of The Integrator — UW ECE's flagship, annual magazine highlighting the Department's extraordinary faculty research, student achievements, alumni stories, special events and more!

UW BIOFAB: A force for reproducible science

The UW’s Biofabrication Center, founded by UW ECE Professor and Chair Eric Klavins, partners with Agilent Technologies in pursuit of automated, reproducible research.

What causes a research paper to be highly cited?

What causes a research publication to become highly cited and stand the test of time? We asked UW ECE faculty to help shed some light on this intriguing question.

Azadeh Yazdan receives $3.2M grant to investigate ways neurotechnology could induce targeted changes in the brain, leading to better treatments for stroke

UW ECE professor Azadeh Yazdan has received an NIH grant to experiment with using optogenetic stimulation, a cutting-edge neurotechnology, to induce targeted changes in the brain.

Not just phoning it in: Shwetak Patel honored by Georgia Tech and Business Insider

UW ECE and CSE professor Shwetak Patel was recently honored by Georgia Tech and Business Insider for his contributions to low-power sensing and mobile health innovation.