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

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.

UW students thrive online, engineering devices to assist people with disabilities

Despite ongoing pressures from the novel coronavirus pandemic, students in the Neural Engineering Tech Studio designed and engineered devices to assist people with conditions such as paralysis, autism, blindness and Parkinson’s disease.

UW ECE faculty and students respond to COVID-19

UW ECE faculty and students are leading collaborative research aimed at reducing impacts of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Projects range from assisting with diagnostics, testing and tracking, to engineering ventilator technology, to developing targeted treatments for the disease.

UW ECE grad student Li Chen writes algorithm to depict cardiovascular risk using knee MRIs and AI

Artificial intelligence cuts diagnostic times from hours to minutes; imaging researchers see vast opportunities.

UW-Medtronic collaboration accelerates research into deep brain stimulation treatment for essential tremor, Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders

UW ECE researchers funded by the Center for Neurotechnology are partnering with Medtronic to impact a wide range of medical conditions.

Awards support development of therapeutic neural interfaces

ECE faculty member Amy Orsborn recently received two prestigious awards that will support her interdisciplinary research aimed at developing neural devices capable of healing and restoring function in the brain and body.