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

Engineering research matters

Learn about the impact and importance of research at the UW College of Engineering, including work by UW ECE assistant professors Jungwon Choi (left) and Kim Ingraham (right).

UW ECE graduate students receive Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship

UW ECE doctoral students and Fellowship recipients Marziyeh Rezaei (left) and Pengyu Zeng (right) are conducting research aimed at enabling scalable, power-efficient optical links for the next generation of edge-cloud data centers supporting 6G infrastructure.

Unlocking the brain with the fruit fly

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.

Yiyue Luo — A I dressed for success

UW ECE assistant professor Yiyue Luo is developing smart clothing that can sense where a person is, know what movement is needed to perform a task, and provide physical cues to guide performance.

Brain-machine interface pioneer Amy Orsborn named 2025 Sloan Research Fellow

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 — graduate student, instructor, and mentor to aspiring engineers

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.