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.
UW ECE Assistant Professor Sajjad Moazeni has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop an optical interconnect that will be fast, compact, and energy efficient.
Beginning this fall and extending through autumn quarter 2025, UW ECE is welcoming six new faculty members who will bring a wide breadth of knowledge and technical expertise to the Department.
The UW ECE Awards recognize exceptional teaching, research, and entrepreneurship efforts in the Department as well as outstanding mentorship, student impact, and collaborative work.
UW ECE and BioE Assistant Professor Amy Orsborn was recently named a recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, one of the most prestigious awards in the nation for early-career faculty.
UW ECE and Allen School Professor Shwetak Patel was recently inducted into the SIGCHI Academy for his contributions in health, sustainability and interaction research. Patel explores how technology can be incorporated with medicine that utilizes sustainable resources.
UW ECE Professor Chet Moritz is leading groundbreaking research enabling some people with paralysis to regain hand strength and function via electrical stimulation to the spine.