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.
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 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
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
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
UW ECE undergraduate Mary Bun studies multitasking in fruit flies to offer valuable insights into disorders like Parkinson’s disease. Her work is inspired by neural engineering research led by UW ECE and UW Medicine Professor Chet Moritz.
Amy Orsborn, a Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering and Bioengineering at the UW, has been awarded a 2025 Sloan Research Fellowship, one of the most prestigious honors awarded to early-career researchers in the U.S and Canada.
Shanti Garman is a doctoral degree candidate at UW ECE, studying and working in the Sensor Systems Lab. She is also an instructor in the Department’s Professional Master’s Program as well as a mentor to aspiring engineers and first-generation college students.
UW ECE doctoral student Niveditha Kalavakonda is engineering an autonomous robotic assistant for providing surgical suction. This device is at the leading edge of technology and is helping to explore a new field: collaborative human-robot interaction in surgical environments.
Read the latest issue of The Integrator, UW ECE’s flagship annual magazine highlighting the Department’s extraordinary faculty and student research, achievements, alumni stories, special events and more from this past year!
UW ECE Assistant Professor Kim Ingraham designs personalized, adaptive control strategies for assistive robotic devices, such as exoskeletons and powered wheelchairs. Her work brings people together from different backgrounds to produce more usable assistive robotic devices.
