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.
Design of biomedical devices including research and clinical neural interfaces, diagnostic devices, wearable sensors, and embedded processing and wireless communication links for biomedical devices.
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.
Recent UW ECE graduate Zerina Kapetanovic (Ph.D. ‘22) has received high honors for her work while at UW ECE. She will join Stanford University in September 2023 as an assistant professor of electrical engineering.
Alana Dee (left) and Marziyeh Rezaei (right) are second-year doctoral students at UW ECE and each is a recipient of a 2022 Cadence Diversity in Technology Scholarship. Both students are advised by UW ECE Assistant Professor Sajjad Moazeni.
A UW ECE student team, led by UW ECE Professor Denise Wilson and Dr. Gregory Valentine from the UW School of Medicine, has engineered a low-cost, highly accurate intravenous (IV) fluid monitor aimed at improving infant health outcomes around the globe.
Two UW ECE-led research teams have been named recipients of CoMotion Gap Fund awards, which provide funds to help ease the transition between academic research grants and attracting seed-stage private investment.
UW ECE Assistant Professor Azadeh Yazdan is co-leading a multi-institutional team that has received a grant from the NIH to develop neural engineering techniques guided by artificial intelligence and aimed at better treatments for mental health disorders.