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

‘Audeo’ teaches artificial intelligence to play the piano

A UW ECE team led by assistant professor Eli Shlizerman has created Audeo, a system that can generate music using only visual cues of someone playing the piano.

Pioneering Safety: UW ECE alum Chung-Kwang “C-K.” Chou receives IEEE Standards Association Lifetime Achievement Award

The award recognizes Dr. Chou’s nearly 50-year-long career devoted to researching electromagnetic energy exposure and his advocacy for the development and adoption of related IEEE safety standards.

New treatment allows some people with spinal cord injury to regain hand and arm function

UW ECE associate professor Chet Moritz and senior postdoctoral researcher Dr. Fatma Inanici have developed a new way to non-invasively, electrically stimulate spinal cord nerves in people with cervical spinal cord injury, resulting in dramatic functional gains.

UW ECE doctoral student Vikram Iyer featured in AAAS for murder hornet tracking; finding ways to meld nature and science

Iyer's impressive work in radio device miniaturization and insect tagging was recently highlighted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Engineers design a tiny, implantable chip to deepen understanding of the brain and enable better treatments for neurological disorders

A UW ECE research team has designed a new chip for neural interfaces that will help increase knowledge about the brain and enable better treatments for a wide range of medical conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy.

UW ECE doctoral student Vikram Iyer receives 2020 Marconi Society Young Scholar Award

This prestigious award from The Marconi Society acknowledges Iyer's innovative work developing bio-inspired and bio-integrative wireless sensor systems.