Article by Wayne Gillam, Photos by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE News
The new UW ECE Entrepreneurial Fellows Program, or UW ECE-EFP, helps translate research into real-world impact. On the left, UW ECE-EFP fellow Jared Nakahara adds droplets into an acoustic levitation prototype he created with his adviser, UW ECE and Allen School Professor Joshua Smith. Together, they co-founded Levity, a startup building acoustic levitators for lab automation. On the right, UW ECE-EFP fellow Sen Zhang holds MultiSensKnit, a sensor-packed knitted sleeve designed for rehabilitation assessment. Zhang created and developed MultiSensKnit with UW ECE Assistant Professor Yiyue Luo.
According to the UW’s innovation hub, CoMotion, UW ECE consistently ranks among the University’s leading generators of startup companies. The Department has maintained this distinction for decades, alongside its strong academic reputation and longstanding history of supporting entrepreneurship. But UW ECE isn’t resting on that legacy. In early 2025, the Department created a new program aimed at fostering and developing entrepreneurs.
The new UW ECE Entrepreneurial Fellows Program, or UW ECE-EFP, is funded exclusively by royalties earned on UW ECE innovations. The Program is designed to support the transfer of research advances into commercialized impact through prototyping, customer discovery, and market analysis.
“This new program enables fellowship recipients to leverage the richness of the entrepreneurial spirit that’s within UW ECE, the UW College of Engineering, and the broader University,” said UW ECE Career and Industry Programs Manager Rebecca Carlson, who facilitates the UW ECE-EFP. “There is a wide variety of instructors and professors here who have started companies, staff and Department affiliates with industry experience, and an alumni network that can help support our fellows in their entrepreneurial endeavors.”
“Innovation starts here because our Department is a place where ideas are born and developed in a serious way.”
— UW ECE Professor and Chair Eric Klavins
Fellowship recipients receive a postdoctoral scholar salary and benefits for one year, partial salary support for their faculty adviser, mentorship from the University’s network of industry experts and entrepreneurs, and support for travel and expenses. UW ECE also partners with the CoMotion Postdoctoral Entrepreneurship Program to provide fellowship recipients with access to an entrepreneurial cohort and a strong support network. This close partnership with CoMotion helps fellows move their research out of the lab and into the marketplace. Current UW ECE doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars as well as those eligible for a postdoctoral scholar position in the Department can apply to the UW ECE-EFP.
“Innovation starts here because our Department is a place where ideas are born and developed in a serious way,” said UW ECE Professor and Chair Eric Klavins. “When we promote entrepreneurship through programs like this, it highlights one of the many ways universities benefit our greater society — serving as a supportive place where people can turn their dreams into reality.”
Read on to learn about the inaugural 2025–26 UW ECE-EFP fellows and how, with the help of this new program, they are each realizing their own vision for the future by turning their research projects into commercial ventures.
Jared Nakahara — Levity
Levity builds acoustic levitators for automated, contamination-free experiments requiring precise control. The prototype shown above, operated by Nakahara, uses ultrasonic sound waves — well above the threshold of human hearing — to suspend and manipulate droplets and small objects in midair without physical contact.
Born and raised in the Seattle area, Jared Nakahara first became interested in engineering when he was in high school, during a summer program at the DigiPen Institute of Technology, a video game and arts college located in Redmond, Washington. The program was provided by the Washington Network for Innovative Careers, and it gave Nakahara his first exposure to robotics, coding, and mechatronics — technology combining mechanical engineering and electronics. Talented in sports and contemplating a career in baseball, Nakahara was inspired by the WANIC program to have a change of heart. He moved his focus from baseball to engineering. Both of Nakahara’s parents were engineers, and being familiar with the field, they encouraged this new direction for their son.
The WANIC summer program sparked what became for Nakahara a passionate interest in electrical and computer engineering. He decided to pursue engineering as a career, and he returned to DigiPen in subsequent years to teach engineering topics to pre-college students. Nakahara chose to study engineering at UW ECE, and he took his education all the way, earning his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering in 2018, 2021, and 2025, respectively.
As a UW ECE undergraduate, Nakahara was initially interested in quantum computing technologies, but after taking a course on field-programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs, taught by UW ECE and Allen School Professor Joshua Smith, his interest shifted to neural engineering. Smith, who is a research leader in the Center for Neurotechnology, was building implantable neural interfaces for spinal cord rehabilitation. The topic fascinated Nakahara. So much so, he joined Smith’s Sensor Systems Laboratory, and when he started graduate school, Smith became his faculty adviser. Today, Nakahara is a postdoctoral scholar in Smith’s lab.
“I think the programmable laboratory space is interesting because we can potentially help to build life-saving pharmaceuticals, treatments for cancer, and personalized medicine as well as other new pharmaceuticals that could be coming to market.”
— Jared Nakahara, UW ECE postdoctoral scholar and 2025–26 UW ECE-EFP fellow
When Nakahara was a graduate student, he and Smith were inspired by transcranial magnetic stimulation, a treatment used for neural disorders, such as depression. With this in mind, they began investigating ways to use acoustic levitation technology to build a non-invasive stimulator for neurons. Acoustic levitation uses high-frequency sound waves (ultrasound) to suspend and move matter in liquids or gas, overcoming gravity. Around this same time, Nakahara developed an interest in robotic manipulation. He built and experimented with different acoustic levitation systems, aiming to develop a tool that could augment the capabilities of general-purpose robots, giving these robots improved manipulation precision and the ability to handle small or fragile objects without making physical contact.
“Bringing the acoustic levitator into the robotic sphere became a fascinating thing for me because I could do it very quickly, innovating on the controls as well as the hardware and software stack,” Nakahara said. “Once I went down that rabbit hole, it evolved into a much bigger thing when I realized our acoustic levitator could be used as a robotic manipulation platform.”
Through discussions with Smith, Nakahara realized that the acoustic levitator they were developing could be beneficial for laboratory experiments in bioengineering and materials science that needed to be automated, contamination-free, and executed with precision. With Smith’s support, Nakahara switched his research focus from neural engineering to acoustic levitation systems. Now, he and Smith are in the early stages of co-founding Levity, a startup company dedicated to building acoustic levitators for laboratory automation.
An acoustic levitation system for next-generation laboratory automation
Levity’s tabletop acoustic levitation system is quick to set up and operate, and it can even run remotely. Nakahara demonstrates the prototype while Smith observes — showing how easy this device is to use.
What Levity’s acoustic levitation system does could seem like science fiction. The device uses high-frequency sound, well above the threshold of human hearing, to levitate, contain, and manipulate liquids and small objects in midair — all without touching the levitated material. This levitator is a completely enclosed tabletop system that can contain filtered air or inert gases useful for laboratory experimentation, such as helium, or argon. The sound waves it generates create three-dimensional traps, pockets of sound pressure, which provide a contactless, contamination-free way of containing, manipulating, and examining liquids, solids, and living organisms. Because it uses ultrasound, the device is inaudible to humans and safe for people to use as well as for any living organism the device might contain.
“One of the nice things our acoustic levitator can do is lift, manipulate, and contain living organisms without harming them,” Nakahara said. “You can put a living ant or mosquito into this device and examine it with a camera. You can look at the entire specimen while it’s alive, do species identification, and extract much more information than you could from a more conventional platform.”
The advantages of Nakahara and Smith’s levitator as compared to other laboratory automation systems are many. Because it is a completely enclosed, contactless system, it provides an encapsulated environment for experiments. It is capable of mixing liquids and manipulating levitated objects ranging from millimeters to nanometers in diameter— all without touching or contaminating the experimental material. It also can be programmed to automate the manipulation and data collection tasks of laboratory experiments, removing typical and often costly human errors that happen when people pipette liquids and handle materials. The device enables the user to view the reaction progress of their experiment from start to finish as well as examine it in great detail with cameras, spectrometers, or other sensors. This complete encapsulation and tight integration of the experimental procedure allows researchers to gather much more reliable data than what would otherwise be possible when using multiple pieces of equipment. And as a high-precision scientific instrument, this acoustic levitation system can measure the mass of levitated matter down to a nanogram without touching it.
In addition, Levity’s acoustic levitation system is a tabletop device that is easy to set up and use, and it can be run remotely offsite. Nakahara said that accessible, remote operation could open up a world of possibilities for users. For example, the levitator could be set up in underserved or hard-to-reach areas to run fast and accurate on-site tests for diseases. Or researchers could automate and run their experiments from outside the lab, enabling them to do other things while saving time and money. Or several of these acoustic levitators working together could be set up to operate much like a computer server farm does today — providing automated laboratory services for many different users, all from one, compact location.
Levity’s acoustic levitation system could appeal to researchers working in many different types of scientific applications. But for now, Nakahara said he sees Levity’s primary market being researchers who need liquid handling systems for DNA, proteins, and microscopic materials as part of their workflow, for example, when scientists are developing pharmaceuticals or medical diagnostics.
“I think the programmable laboratory space is interesting because we can potentially help to build life-saving pharmaceuticals, treatments for cancer, and personalized medicine as well as other new pharmaceuticals that could be coming to market,” Nakahara said. “If we can help doctors as well as the health-care industry provide faster diagnoses and better treatments, then that’s something of great benefit to everybody.”
How the Fellows Program will help Levity grow
Three acoustic levitators created by Nakahara and Smith during Levity’s prototyping phase. From left to right, in order of development: The V1 model, built to work with robotic grippers and expand their capabilities; Levity’s demonstration system, which offers a clear view of levitated objects; Levity’s contactless acoustic levitation system, which can hold up to four liquid or solid samples while manipulating the levitated objects along their vertical axes.
Nadya Peek, an assistant professor in the UW Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, has also contributed to this project. Nakahara said that he considers Peek to be a mentor as well as a collaborator. Peek, whose research focuses on harnessing machine precision to enable individual creativity, has contributed her expertise to help make acoustic levitation useful to researchers.
The acoustic levitation research program in Smith’s lab has already received some academic research funding through a grant Smith and Peek received in 2020 from the National Science Foundation. Smith, Peek, and Nakahara also received a grant in 2022 from the CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund, which supports innovations developed at the UW that have high commercialization potential. Now that he is a UW ECE-EFP fellow, Nakahara believes he has the resources and support needed to take Levity to the next level.
“In addition to the funding, this Program provides support, mentorship, and networking opportunities through CoMotion,” Nakahara said. “The Fellows Program also gives us access to all the connections the University itself has, so we can leverage that network. Taken together, this enables us to grow in the right way, do additional customer discovery, and validate and de-risk our ideas before the acoustic levitator goes to the marketplace.”
Nakahara is currently in the midst of building what he calls a “minimum lovable product” — a top-tier product that Levity’s customer base will love so much, they won’t want to do without it. To this end, he is distributing prototype systems to labs at the UW and gathering user feedback to fine-tune the product to the user’s wants and needs. He is also planning for growth in the coming year, when he anticipates distributing acoustic levitation system prototypes to research groups at other universities as well as companies that could use these devices for bioengineering and pharmaceutical research.
Looking ahead, Nakahara said he envisions Levity’s acoustic levitation system evolving so that it could provide an even wider range of laboratory services while, at the same time, offer researchers the option to execute those functions remotely.
“The opportunity to have real-world impact that can help accelerate and maybe contribute to the next big scientific discovery is personally motivating to me, “Nakahara said. “I’m excited to see all of the awesome innovations and advances that could come downstream from providing Levity’s acoustic levitation system to talented researchers.”
Sen Zhang — MultiSensKnit
UW ECE-EFP fellow Sen Zhang holds MultiSensKnit, a smart textile for rehabilitation assessment that is wearable, comfortable, and washable. MultiSensKnit is a knitted sleeve that contains conductive yarn (the gray strip on the sleeve) and sensors that can pick up EMG and EIT signals as well as measure joint angles while worn by the user. Behind Zhang, on the whiteboard, are calculations that illustrate the working principles behind MultiSensKnit.
Sen Zhang grew up in Anyang City in Henan Province, China. As a child, he had several creative interests, and he loved to play. He enjoyed building structures with Legos®, making small, electrical cars and toys, and sewing fabric — all activities that, looking back, served as seeds for his engineering career today.
Both of his parents were medical doctors, and they expected their son to follow in their footsteps after high school. However, Zhang heard the beat of a different drum. When it was time for him to select a university and a course of study, he decided to major in textile engineering instead of pursuing a career in medicine. Zhang attended Jiangnan University in Jiangsu Province, China, where he studied textile production. His coursework included learning how to spin yarn from source material, such as cotton, and weave or knit that yarn into fabric. His classes also taught him how spinning, weaving, and knitting could be used as industrial-scale techniques to produce finished fabrics for the marketplace.
In 2019, Zhang received his bachelor’s degree in textile engineering from Jiangnan University. He then went on to graduate studies at North Carolina State University’s Wilson College of Textiles. In 2020, he received his master’s degree from NC State in textile engineering. And in 2023, he also earned a master’s degree in statistics from NC State. During graduate school, Zhang studied smart textiles — fabrics that integrate electronic components, such as sensors and actuators. He decided that he wanted to further his study in this area, so he enrolled in the College’s doctoral program, where he did research focused on textile-based, soft, wearable robotics. In 2024, he received his doctoral degree from NC State in fiber and polymer science.
“I believe we have created something in the lab that will be helpful in the clinic. And that’s why I want to push MultiSensKnit out of the lab and into the marketplace as a real-world product.”
— Sen Zhang, UW ECE postdoctoral scholar and 2025–26 UW ECE-EFP fellow
That same year, Zhang joined the lab of UW ECE Assistant Professor Yiyue Luo as a postdoctoral scholar. Luo is a leader in the development of smart textiles and wearable technologies. Her research brings together digital fabrication, human-computer/robot interaction, and applied artificial intelligence. It was a perfect fit for Zhang, and Luo’s lab provided room for him to grow in his chosen field.
“Even though the research I did in my Ph.D. program was focused on textile-based, soft, wearable robotics, I had very little experience with wearable sensors and how they could be used,” Zhang said. “Yiyue brought me into this area. She also suggested that we should explore using wearable sensors to create medical devices.”
Zhang and Luo discussed this idea with UW ECE Professor Chet Moritz. Moritz holds joint appointments in rehabilitation medicine, physiology, and biophysics, and he is co-director of the Center for Neurotechnology. Moritz leads the Restorative Technologies Lab at the UW, which develops neuroprosthetic technology to treat paralysis and other movement disorders. His lab regularly brings in people who have had a spinal cord injury, stroke, or other medical conditions to test and monitor their progress using neural devices he and his research team have designed. In their conversations with Moritz, Zhang and Luo realized that his lab might provide an opportunity for them to gather valuable user feedback on wearable technology that could assess a patient’s progress with rehabilitation exercises.
In-home rehabilitation assessment using wearable technology
Zhang with his adviser, UW ECE Assistant Professor Yiyue Luo, who wears a MultiSensKnit prototype on her arm. Zhang developed MultiSensKnit under Luo’s guidance.
With guidance from Luo, Zhang developed MultiSensKnit — a smart textile for rehabilitation assessment that is wearable, comfortable, and washable. MultiSensKnit is a soft, knitted sleeve Zhang produced by knitting conductive yarn with traditional yarn on an industrial-scale knitting machine in Luo’s lab. The conductive yarn is made out of stainless-steel fibers, which are spun together to form the yarn. Although the yarn is made out of steel, it feels like traditional yarn, soft to the touch. And because stainless steel is rust, stain, and corrosion resistant, the material is washable and wearable for long periods of time.
MultiSensKnit is a multimodal sensing smart textile. This knitted sleeve is embedded with electromyography, or EMG, sensors to measure the electrical activity of muscles and nerves in the bicep, triceps, and front of the arm. The device can also measure joint angles as the arm is moved and muscles are flexed. And as if that weren’t enough, MultiSensKnit also contains electrical impedance tomography, or EIT, sensors to construct a map of tissues inside the arm.
Currently, wearable sensors for rehabilitation assessment are unwieldy, and most can only measure one type of signal or marker from the body. Today, patients are required to come into clinics to put on multiple types of bulky equipment for rehabilitation assessment. This is expensive and inconvenient, to say the least, but it also means that the patient will have to repeat their rehabilitation exercises several times wearing different types of sensors. This can be tiring for the patients and taxing on their bodies.
In contrast, MultiSensKnit allows patients to simply put on a soft, knitted sleeve and wear it, just like they would any other piece of clothing, from the comfort of their own home. Zhang, Luo, and their research team have also developed small printed circuit boards, or PCBs, each about the size of a smart phone, which patients can put in their pockets while they do their rehabilitation exercises. The PCBs pick up data from the sensors in MultiSensKnit and transmit the information wirelessly to the patient’s phone or computer, which then sends the data through the internet to the patient’s health care provider.
“With this device, your clothes function as a wearable sensor, which to me, is a very exciting idea,” Zhang said. “MultiSensKnit is washable, durable, and comfortable. You don’t need to worry about the sensor as you go about your daily life. You can just wear it like normal apparel.”
How the Fellows Program will help MultiSensKnit grow
This close-up of MultiSensKnit shows gray squares of conductive yarn knit into white traditional yarn. The fabric is soft, durable, and washable. Inside the gray squares are EMG and EIT sensors that track muscle and nerve signals and can even map tissues inside the arm.
According to the World Health Organization, globally, an estimated 2.4 billion people are living with a health condition that could benefit from rehabilitation. And as people live longer and populations age, that number is expected to grow. This is a huge market. And because MultiSensKnit can be used to gather data from the body in several different ways, it could also be used for purposes other than rehabilitation, such as fitness tracking or helping athletes improve their performance. These areas also hold great potential for commercialization, but for now, Zhang said he is focusing their efforts primarily on providing the product to doctors and health-care clinics for rehabilitation assessment. He said he views the UW ECE-EFP as a key support mechanism for helping him to bring his research project to this marketplace.
“I really appreciate the entrepreneurship opportunities the fellowship provides. Because I’m a researcher, I spend much of my time in the lab. I did a lot of research on this smart sleeve, and I hope it can help to improve people’s lives,” Zhang said. “I didn’t know how to start a company and bring products to the market, so this Program is helping me learn how to create a startup, how to brand it, advertise, and move my product to the market, so people can buy it. It’s helping me not only to develop the technology but also to push this device out of our lab and into the real world.”
Zhang is also part of CoMotion’s Postdoctoral Entrepreneurship Program, where alongside other PEP participants, he works, studies, and learns how to commercialize a product while creating a startup. This program at CoMotion provides regular meetings and assignments for Zhang and his cohort. He will meet with an industry mentor through the PEP, which will provide further education and networking opportunities. He is also working with CoMotion to file the patent for MultiSensKnit.
In addition to filing for a patent, next steps for Zhang to commercialize MultiSensKnit include finishing the optimization of the smart sleeve according to feedback gathered from users in Moritz’ lab, setting up clinical trials for the device, and working toward acquiring Federal Drug Administration approval for the product.
When the time comes, Zhang is envisioning two stages for distributing MultiSensKnit to the public. In the first stage, he will partner with doctors, clinics, and telehealth providers. Patients will first purchase the product based on their health care provider’s recommendation. They will then work with a technician, physical therapist, or doctor, who will customize the fit of the smart sleeve to the patient’s arm and adjust electrode locations as needed. In the next stage of development, when the product is more mature, Zhang said he could imagine patients ordering MultiSensKnit directly from a major online retailer, such as Amazon. Patients could input their arm size and other parameters, then MultiSensKnit could be customized to fit that particular individual and shipped to them.
“We are using an industrial-scale, digital knitting machine, so it’s easy to customize garments for everyone. The logic is similar to a 3D printer, where you can print anything you want in any shape you desire,” Zhang said. “So, we don’t need a clothing company to cut and sew the fabric, we can produce this smart sleeve after gathering fitting information from the intended user and ship it to their home.”
Zhang has a lot to look forward to as he develops MultiSensKnit for the marketplace. And looking back, he noted where his personal motivation for this work springs from.
“Both of my parents were doctors, and I learned a lot from them and their experience in medicine. They have inspired me to make something that will help patients with the healing process,” Zhang said. “I believe we have created something in the lab that will be helpful in the clinic. And that’s why I want to push MultiSensKnit out of the lab and into the marketplace as a real-world product.”
Applications for the 2026–27 UW ECE-EFP cohort will open in the spring. More information is available on the UW ECE-EFP webpage and from UW ECE Career and Industry Programs Manager Rebecca Carlson. Both Jared Nakahara and Sen Zhang are currently open to and seeking collaborative opportunities for their research and product development. To inquire, contact Jared Nakahara at jarednak@uw.edu and Sen Zhang at szhang66@uw.edu.