UW ECE Assistant Professor Serena Eley studies superconductors and magnets, searching for ways to fine-tune the atomic disorder landscape in these materials and leverage their unique properties for quantum technology development.
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.
UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar and his students have collaborated with Princeton University to build a new type of compact camera engineered for computer vision. Their prototype uses optics for computing, significantly reducing power consumption and enabling the camera to identify objects at light speed.
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 faculty are leaders in microchip design and are known internationally for their creative, interdisciplinary approaches to chip design and development.
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.
UW ECE Assistant Professor Serena Eley studies superconductors and magnets, searching for ways to fine-tune the atomic disorder landscape in these materials and leverage their unique properties for quantum technology development.
UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar and his students have collaborated with Princeton University to build a new type of compact camera engineered for computer vision. Their prototype uses optics for computing, significantly reducing power consumption and enabling the camera to identify objects at light speed.
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.
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[_finalHTML:protected] => https://ece.uw.edu/spotlight/amy-orsborn-2025-sloan-fellowship/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.
Serena Eley — studying superconductivity, magnetism, and disorder in quantum materials
UW ECE Assistant Professor Serena Eley studies superconductors and magnets, searching for ways to fine-tune the atomic disorder landscape in these materials and leverage their unique properties for quantum technology development.
A camera that can identify objects at the speed of light
UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar and his students have collaborated with Princeton University to build a new type of compact camera engineered for computer vision. Their prototype uses optics for computing, significantly reducing power consumption and enabling the camera to identify objects at light speed.
Niveditha Kalavakonda — building an intelligent robot to assist surgeons
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.
The Integrator 2024–2025
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!
Kim Ingraham — engineering assistive robotic devices for people with disabilities
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.
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. Photo by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE[/caption]
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. The competitive fellowship recognizes 126 promising scholars with leadership potential. Many past fellows have later earned Nobel Prizes and National Medals of Science.
Orsborn’s research is focused on understanding motor learning principles to enhance movement-restoring therapies. Her work combines engineering and neuroscience to develop brain-machine interfaces that restore, replace and augment nervous system function, particularly for movement disorders such as paralysis from spinal cord injuries or strokes. Her lab works to make these interfaces more effective by tapping into neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to adapt) and using them to better understand how learning happens in the brain.
In her Sloan Research Fellowship nomination letter, UW Bioengineering Professor and Chair Princess Imoukhuede wrote, “What makes Dr. Orsborn unique is her computational mindset, rooted in her engineering and physics background, combined with her deep expertise in experimental systems neuroscience. She performs cutting-edge experiments in non-human primates and humans using advanced computational and neurophysiological tools to reveal new insights into how neural circuits learn.”
The two-year fellowship provides awardees with $75,000 which can be applied to any expenses that supports their research endeavors. “The award will help us continue to take new risks and explore new projects,” Orsborn said. “Its support will help us go a little deeper and tackle harder questions.”
In addition to the Sloan Research Fellowship, Orsborn has received numerous awards and honors including a National Science Foundation Career Award, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) Emerging Leaders Program Award and the inaugural Washington Research Foundation – Ronald S. Howell Distinguished Faculty Fellowship.
To learn more about Prof. Orsborn and her research, visit her faculty page or lab website. This fellowship announcement is also in UW News.
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[post_content] => By Wayne Gillam / UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_36778" align="alignright" width="600"]
UW ECE Assistant Professor Serena Eley studies superconductors and magnets, searching for ways to fine-tune the atomic disorder landscape in these materials and leverage their unique properties for quantum technology development. Photo by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE[/caption]
Imperfection and disorder are part of life. This is true, not only on the level of everyday reality with which we are most familiar, but also within all matter at the smallest scales imaginable. At the nanoscale, ordered atomic lattices that make up solid-state materials contain impurities, dislocations, bends, and vacancies in their grids. And in some materials important to engineering, such as superconductors and magnets, this disorder can actually be useful, for example, helping scientists and engineers control the motion of a nanoscale whirlpool of electrical current called a “quantum vortex.” Superconductors and magnets can host a multitude of these tiny vortices, which can be thought of as mini-tornadoes of electrical current or electron spins, swirling around, interacting with, and disrupting electrical currents within the materials.
UW ECE Assistant Professor Serena Eley studies these vortices. Her lab, the Eley Quantum Materials Group, examines superconductors and magnets, searching for ways to fine-tune the atomic disorder landscape in these materials and leverage their unique properties for quantum technology development. Her research involves finding ways to control the motion and formation of quantum vortices by optimizing defects in superconductors, work aimed at further enhancing conductivity and reducing energy loss. For example, she was recently part of an international research team that achieved the maximum critical current that has ever been measured in an iron-based superconductor to date, groundbreaking work that was described in the journal Nature Materials. Her research also includes studying defects and a vortex-like excitation in magnets called a “skyrmion.” These quasi-particles are showing promise as information carriers for spintronic devices, which encode information in the spin of an electron. Spintronic devices have proven to be useful in computing, data storage, and even biomedical applications. They also have several advantages over conventional electronics, such as faster switching speeds, higher data storage density, and lower energy consumption.
“We try to increase our fundamental understanding of superconductivity and magnetism in a way that can contribute to a wide range of applications. But when designing superconductors, we also have to consider the impact of vortices,” Eley said. “It affects all these applications. So, when designing the material or the device, we have to think about how to lessen the impact of vortices in some instances and how to maximize their effectiveness in others.”
Superconductors and magnets are already in wide use today — from magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scanners that look deep inside the body to gamma ray detectors of clandestine nuclear material to bolometers used in x-ray astronomy. They have been implemented in medical, military, security, and power applications as well as quantum computing and sensing. Because Eley’s research contributes to expanding fundamental knowledge about superconductivity and magnetism, her work could contribute to advancing technology in all of these areas. But her research is primarily aimed at the development of quantum computing systems, which show great promise for facilitating significant breakthroughs in science, medicine, and engineering.
A physicist who is also an engineer
[caption id="attachment_36780" align="alignright" width="500"]
Jiangteng (Ivan) Liu, a UW doctoral student in physics, with Eley in her lab at UW ECE. Liu is drawing a magnetization loop, which describes how the current-carrying capacity of a superconductor varies with an applied magnetic field. Photo by Dennis Wise / University of Washington[/caption]
Eley became fascinated with superconductivity in elementary school, after reading an article about maglev trains, which use a combination of superconductors and magnets to achieve a stable levitation state. She realized, even at a young age, that she wanted to learn more about superconductivity and magnetism, so she set her mind toward pursuing a career in science. She attended a science and technology high school in Northern Virginia and later went on to Caltech, where she received her bachelor’s degree in physics in 2002. After graduation, she spent a year as a research assistant and a Henry Luce Scholar at the International Superconductivity Technology Center in Tokyo, Japan. She then attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where, in 2012, she earned her doctoral degree in physics.
After graduate school, Eley worked for two years at Sandia National Laboratories designing silicon-based devices composed of quantum dot nanostructures. This was followed by three years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she studied vortex dynamics in superconductors. In 2018, she accepted a position as an assistant professor of physics at the Colorado School of Mines. And in January 2023, she joined UW ECE as a tenure-track assistant professor. Eley said she made the move to UW ECE because of the number and caliber of graduate students in the Department as well as access to state-of-the-art facilities, such as those available at the Washington Nanofabrication Facility and the UW Molecular Engineering Materials Center.
“I’m in an electrical engineering department, but I definitely think like a physicist because that’s my background,” Eley said. “In physics, you’re usually trying to develop fundamental knowledge, rather than design a device or a system. But my research has always been forward thinking in terms of exploring how fundamental properties connect to applications, so it ends up working well in an electrical engineering department.”
In addition to the Luce award, Eley received the John Bardeen award at the University of Illinois for her doctoral dissertation, which explored proximity effects and vortex dynamics in nanostructured superconductors. She also has received many other awards and honors, such as a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Joseph A. Johnson III Award for Excellence, a Goddard Award for Best Research Contribution at the NASA Academy Goddard Space Flight Center, and a Cottrell Scholars Award.
The Eley Quantum Materials Group
[caption id="attachment_36783" align="alignright" width="500"]
Members of the Eley Quantum Materials Group in Ely’s lab at UW ECE. From left to right: Chris Matsumura, UW doctoral student in physics; Rohin Tangirala, UW ECE doctoral student; Chaman Gupta (on ladder), UW doctoral student in materials science and engineering; UW ECE Assistant Professor Serena Eley; Raahul Potluri (BSEE ‘24), UW ECE post baccalaureate student; Jiangteng (Ivan) Liu, UW doctoral student in physics. Photo by Dennis Wise / University of Washington[/caption]
Eley’s lab at UW ECE includes undergraduate and graduate students from a range of disciplines, including electrical and computer engineering, physics, and materials science. Her UW collaborators include Jiun-Haw Chu, an associate professor in the physics department, who creates high-quality superconducting and magnetic materials for Eley’s research experiments. Eley is also a faculty member of the Institute for Nano-Engineered Systems and QuantumX at the University.
Eley’s specialty is vortex physics, and the overarching goal of her research is to study the effects of disorder on the electronic and magnetic properties of quantum materials and devices. To this end, she and her research team study vortex dynamics in superconductors, the effects of disorder on skyrmion dynamics in magnetic materials, and energy loss mechanisms in superconducting quantum circuits. Eley is also leading a concerted effort to move toward predictive design in a field that has traditionally relied on trial and error to discover and improve superconducting and magnetic materials.
“In an ideal world, we would be able to improve our understanding of vortex physics enough that we could, based on some basic parameters of the material, design the optimal defect landscape without so much trial and error,” Eley said. “For example, in different superconductors and based on each material’s properties, we want to figure out what the ideal disorder landscape might look like, so we can maximize the current-carrying capacity of the material.”
A dedicated educator
[caption id="attachment_36785" align="alignright" width="500"]
Eley with students, standing next to a magnetometer in her lab. The group is discussing magnetic phases in iron-based superconducting crystals and corresponding effects on the motion of superconducting quantum vortices in the material. Photo by Dennis Wise / University of Washington[/caption]
Eley teaches undergraduate and graduate-level courses at UW ECE. She has also worked with Department staff members May Lim, director of industry and professional programs, and Rebecca Carlson, career and industry programs manager, to start a UW ECE Industry Mentors program. Many leading companies, such as Boeing, Airbus, Intel, and Rigetti Computing are participating. This effort connects undergraduates with mentors who are working in fields related to the students’ career interests. She noted that students are not usually given this sort of opportunity until they are seniors, at which point it is too late for them to go back and select courses related to their mentorship experience.
“I think it’s important to connect freshman and sophomore-level undergraduates with mentors who are actively working in their goal fields,” Eley said. “These professionals are best positioned to provide students with up-to-date advice on what they should be doing and what courses they should be taking to create a strong academic profile for career goals.”
Eley said that she enjoys teaching and the challenge of explaining complex topics to students. She also has some advice for them. For undergraduates, she recommends that every summer be spent in an internship. This provides opportunities to try out different working environments long before choosing a job. For graduate students, she advises them to focus on one project or research direction and prove their ability by getting results. More specifically, she said it is important for graduate students to demonstrate their technical capabilities, scientific communication skills, and analytical ability (being able to extract the science from their technical accomplishments) before moving on to seek professional development opportunities.
As exemplified by her advice to students, quantum science and engineering is a field that requires rigorous discipline. And Eley is no stranger to a disciplined approach professionally or personally. Outside of the UW, she spends much of her free time training for 100-mile ultramarathons. In 2024, she completed the Hardrock Hundred Mile Endurance Run, which summits multiple 13,000-foot peaks in southern Colorado, and the Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc in Chamonix, France, which winds its way for 110 miles through France, Switzerland, and Italy. Other notable performances include finishing as the third-fastest female runner in the 2023 Grindstone Trail Running Festival in Virginia’s Allegheny Mountains and the second-fastest female in the 2017 Angeles Crest 100 Mile Endurance Run in the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles.
Running 100-mile races takes grit, determination, and a special kind of love for an uncommon interest. It could be argued that these character traits lend themselves well to quantum science and engineering. Building a successful career in this field also takes a special interest and discipline. It perhaps even benefits from a sense of awe and fascination with the subject matter, much like what Eley has demonstrated since childhood.
“I think I will always be fascinated by superconductivity. I understand the math, but still, it can be hard to fully comprehend,” Eley said. “It’s like flying in an airplane. You may understand the concept of lift and the supporting mathematics. But still, it’s pretty amazing to realize that a plane can fly without falling. That’s how I feel about superconductivity.”
For more information about UW ECE Assistant Professor Serena Eley, her research, and work as an educator, visit her bio page.
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[post_content] => By Wayne Gillam / UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_36551" align="alignright" width="600"]
UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar and his students have collaborated with Princeton University to build a new type of compact camera engineered for computer vision. Their prototype (shown above) uses optics for computing, significantly reducing power consumption and enabling the camera to identify objects at the speed of light. Photo by Ilya Chugunov, courtesy of Princeton University[/caption]
Collaboration can be a beautiful thing, especially when people work together to create something new. Take, for example, a longstanding collaboration between Arka Majumdar, a UW professor in electrical and computer engineering and physics, and Felix Heide, an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton University. Together, they and their students have produced some eye-popping and groundbreaking research, including shrinking a camera down to the size of a grain of salt while still capturing crisp, clear images.
Now, the pair is building on this work, recently publishing a paper in Science Advances that describes a new kind of compact camera engineered for computer vision — a type of artificial intelligence that allows computers to recognize objects in images and video. Majumdar and Heide’s research prototype uses optics for computing, significantly reducing power consumption and enabling the camera to identify objects at the speed of light. Their device also represents a new approach to the field of computer vision.
“This is a completely new way of thinking about optics, which is very different from traditional optics. It’s end-to-end design, where the optics are designed in conjunction with the computational block,” Majumdar said. “Here, we replaced the camera lens with engineered optics, which allows us to put a lot of the computation into the optics.”
[caption id="attachment_36593" align="alignleft" width="350"]
Majumdar (left) and Felix Heide, an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton University. Photos by Ryan Hoover (UW ECE) and Steven Schultz (Princeton University)[/caption]
“There are really broad applications for this research, from self-driving cars, self-driving trucks and other robotics to medical devices and smartphones. Nowadays, every iPhone has AI or vision technology in it,” added Heide, who was the principal investigator and senior author of the Science Advances paper. “This work is still at a very early stage, but all of these applications could someday benefit from what we are developing.”
Heide and his students at Princeton provided the design for the camera prototype, which is a compact, optical computing chip. Majumdar contributed his expertise in optics to help engineer the camera, and he and his students fabricated the chip in the Washington Nanofabrication Laboratory. The UW side of this multi-institutional research team included Johannes Froech, a UW ECE postdoctoral scholar, and James Whitehead (Ph.D. ‘22), who was a UW ECE doctoral student in Majumdar’s lab when this research took place.
Replacing a camera lens with engineered optics
[caption id="attachment_36554" align="alignright" width="500"]
Instead of using a traditional camera lens made out of glass or plastic, the optics in this camera relies on layers of 50 meta-lenses — flat, lightweight optical components that use microscopic nanostructures to manipulate light. These meta-lenses fit into a compact, optical computing chip (shown above), which was fabricated in the Washington Nanofabrication Laboratory by Majumdar and his students. Photo by Ilya Chugunov, courtesy of Princeton University[/caption]
Instead of using a traditional camera lens made out of glass or plastic, the optics in this camera relies on layers of 50 meta-lenses — flat, lightweight optical components that use microscopic nanostructures to manipulate light. The meta-lenses also function as an optical neural network, which is a computer system that is a form of artificial intelligence modeled on the human brain. This unique approach has a couple of key advantages. First, it’s fast. Because much of the computation takes place at the speed of light, the system can identify and classify images more than 200 times faster than neural networks that use conventional computer hardware, and with comparable accuracy. Second, because the optics in the camera rely on incoming light to operate, rather than electricity, the power consumption is greatly reduced.
“Our idea was to use some of the work that Arka pioneered on metasurfaces to bring some of those computations that are traditionally done electronically into the optics at the speed of light,” Heide said. “By doing so, we produced a new computer vision system that performs a lot of the computation optically.”
Majumdar and Heide say that they intend to continue their collaboration. Next steps for this research include further iterations, evolving the prototype so it is more relevant for autonomous navigation in self-driving vehicles. This is an application area they both have identified as promising. They also plan to work with more complex data sets and problems that take greater computing power to solve, such as object detection (locating specific objects within an image), which is an important feature for computer vision.
“Right now, this optical computing system is a research prototype, and it works for one particular application,” Majumdar said. “However, we see it eventually becoming broadly applicable to many technologies. That, of course, remains to be seen, but here, we demonstrated the first step. And it is a big step forward compared to all other existing optical implementations of neural networks.”
The article, “Spatially varying nanophotonic neural networks,” was published Nov. 8 in Science Advances. In addition to Majumdar, Froech, Whitehead, and Heide, co-authors include Kaixuan Wei, Xiao Li, Praneeth Chakravarthula, and Ethan Tseng. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Packard Foundation Fellowship, a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Disney Research Award, a Bosch Research Award, an Amazon Science Research Award, a Google Ph.D. Fellowship, and Project X, an innovation fund of Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.
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[post_content] => Article by Wayne Gillam, Photos by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_36294" align="alignright" width="565"]
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. Kalavakonda is also a 2024 Yang Award recipient, has received numerous other awards and honors during her time in the Department, and she is exceptionally engaged with faculty, students, and staff.[/caption]
If one were to try to imagine a robot in a medical setting, it could bring to mind images from science fiction movies, such as Star Wars, where medical droids work alongside doctors and surgeons to heal their patients. And in fact, it was imagery such as this that first inspired UW ECE doctoral student Niveditha (Nivii) Kalavakonda, who became fascinated with robotics at an early age through science fiction books and movies.
“I knew early on that I wanted to be in robotics, and I figured that studying engineering would be the obvious step to move into that space,” Kalavakonda said. “I also thought electrical engineering sounded like a good place to be because it would provide me with insight into both software and hardware.”
Kalavakonda was also introduced to medical settings at a young age. Growing up in Chennai, India, as the daughter of a neurosurgeon, she witnessed the impact of her father’s work through many grateful patients, some of whom remained in contact with him decades after their surgeries were complete. Given this background, it’s perhaps not surprising that today, Kalavakonda is building her own robot at UW ECE, one that is infused with artificial intelligence and engineered to work alongside surgeons.
But the road from India to UW ECE had a few twists and turns along the way. After high school, Kalavakonda chose to pursue a degree in electronics and communications engineering at the Amrita School of Engineering in Coimbatore, India. She studied circuits and basic control systems there, but the school’s engineering program did not focus on robotics or research as much as she would have liked. However, after receiving her bachelor’s degree in 2014, she spent a pivotal year at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, where she worked in the lab of Professor Asokan Thondiyath. There, she was exposed to research in different areas of robotics. In a fortuitous twist of fate, she was tasked with working in virtual reality and building a simulator for a surgical robotic arm that the lab was developing. Kalavakonda said she felt immediately drawn to the project because she saw the potential impact it could have on shaping healthcare in India.
“I fully expect that Nivii’s work will actually help to launch a new subfield, surgical human-robot interaction, as a new community within both the HRI and surgical robotics communities.” — UW ECE Professor Blake Hannaford
It was in Thondiyath’s lab that Kalavakonda came across research by UW ECE Professor Blake Hannaford, who later became her adviser throughout her graduate studies. Kalavakonda had been admitted to several graduate schools after receiving her bachelor’s degree, but she said that she ended up choosing UW ECE because Hannaford’s lab had valuable collaborations with medical institutions. She also was drawn to the fact that Hannaford and his graduate students in the UW BioRobotics Laboratory built hardware like the RAVEN surgical robot. In 2015, Kalavakonda moved to Seattle and started working toward her master’s degree at UW ECE with Hannaford as her adviser. And in 2016, she joined the UW BioRobotics Lab. The following year, she was accepted into the Department’s doctoral degree program.
[caption id="attachment_36300" align="alignleft" width="560"]
This photo and the one below shows Kalavakonda setting up a collaborative human-robot interaction experiment designed to have a surgeon and a robot perform tasks in parallel to achieve a shared goal. Here, the RAVEN grasper tool was retrofitted with a suction device to operate within a laparoscopic surgery training task. The surgeon performs a peg transfer sequence while the robot autonomously clears away simulated bleeding points.[/caption]
During her time as a graduate student at UW ECE, Kalavakonda has been involved in several projects aimed at bringing leading-edge technologies into medical settings. These projects included working in the UW Amplifying Movement & Performance Lab on providing haptic feedback to users of a myoelectric prosthesis (an artificial limb that uses electrical signals from muscles in the remaining limb to move), developing software for the Microsoft HoloLens that could help surgeons at UW Medicine precisely locate tumors to be excised from the body, and developing remote calibration for cochlear implants at Seattle Children’s Hospital. She also has held internships at Apple, Amazon, and Nvidia, which expanded her knowledge and experience in artificial intelligence, robotics, and computer vision.
Kalavakonda received her master’s degree in electrical engineering from UW ECE in 2017, and she expects to graduate with her doctoral degree from the Department at the end of winter quarter 2025. She has already received many awards and honors for her work and engagement in the Department, but it’s the topic of her doctoral dissertation that has perhaps created the greatest buzz.
“Nivii came to the UW with an exciting background in virtual reality programming. She very quickly dove into a medical application of augmented reality, and her dissertation represents her ambitious vision of an autonomous robotic assistant for neurosurgery,” Hannaford said. “I fully expect that Nivii’s work will actually help to launch a new subfield, surgical human-robot interaction, as a new community within both the HRI and surgical robotics communities.”
Yang Award for Outstanding Doctoral Student
[caption id="attachment_36304" align="alignright" width="560"]
Kalavakonda, alongside UW mechanical engineering graduate student Tin Chiang (left) and UW ECE doctoral student Hoanan Peng (right), set up a teleoperation experiment for the RAVEN II surgical robot.[/caption]
In May 2024, Kalavakonda received the Yang Award for Outstanding Doctoral Student at UW ECE for researching human-robot interaction designed for healthcare environments and for building community in the Department through various leadership initiatives. The Yang Award recognizes a UW ECE doctoral student in their final year of study who has conducted outstanding research in the field of electrical and computer engineering as evidenced by their publications or recognized by outside researchers in the field.
The Yang Award was established by successful entrepreneur and former UW ECE faculty member Andrew T. Yang, who has been one of the most influential people in the electronic design automation industry for nearly three decades. Yang is known for being a visionary in both research and entrepreneurship. The purpose of the award is to recognize and encourage outstanding doctoral student research contributions to the field of electrical engineering. The award goes to one qualifying student per year and is open to all doctoral degree candidates in UW ECE. Receiving the Yang Award is considered a high honor and helps to create career opportunities for the recipient.
“It’s reaffirming to hear from the leaders of our Department that I’m doing good research that they believe in, and it helps me to believe in my research a little bit more,” Kalavakonda said. “The award also has helped me realize that academia is where I want to be.”
In addition to the Yang Award, Kalavakonda has received several other honors during her time at UW ECE, including being named this year as one of the Husky 100 — a group of top students at the UW. She also was a part of the Robotics Science and Systems Pioneers Cohort in 2021, received an Irene Peden Fellowship in 2022, and was named an Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Rising Star in 2023. And it was an Amazon Catalyst Fellowship award she received in 2017 that gave her an opportunity to put the thesis of her doctoral dissertation into action, launching her development of an intelligent robot that could assist a surgeon.
An autonomous robotic assistant for surgical suction
[caption id="attachment_36312" align="alignright" width="560"]
A closeup showing pegs, beads, and artificial blood used to test the robot’s ability to provide suction alongside a surgeon in a tight operating environment.[/caption]
Robotic surgery has many advantages for patients, including minimal invasion, reduced risk of infection, faster recovery time, and lessened scarring. Robots also have increased dexterity and vision capabilities as compared to humans, especially in hard-to-reach places inside the human body. In the medical field today, there are already robots operating as extensions of surgeons’ hands as well as robotic systems being developed for entirely automated processes. However, Kalavakonda’s research is focused on building a robot that can understand the surgical environment and the people in it while operating independently. This robot will perform assistive tasks alongside surgeons, identifying and performing dynamic actions without interfering with the surgeon’s physical motions or tools during surgery. This work is made possible through close collaboration with Dr. Laligam Sekhar and his fellows at the Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.
To move toward this ambitious goal, Kalavakonda has developed software for the RAVEN surgical robot that empowers the device to perform a very specific task during neurosurgery— applying suction upon request, removing spots of blood that might block a surgeon’s vision. Because this is brain surgery, the robot is operating in a very narrow field of view of one to two centimeters in diameter. The software helps the robot to understand this tiny surgical scene through computer vision and take actions using trajectory prediction.
Kalavakonda’s software also allows the robot to adapt to different surgeons and their behavior patterns while operating. To make this possible, Kalavakonda has created adaptive AI learning models to help the robot learn the environment, infer the surgeon’s intent, and not bump into surgical tools or the surroundings. This work has required Kalavakonda and her colleagues to dig deep into existing human-robot interaction research and conduct extensive user studies examining specific human behaviors in surgical environments. She also collaborates with the UW Science, Technology & Society Studies Certificate Program to study the changes in surgical team dynamics caused by different levels of automation in surgical robotics, and she confers with Professor Ryan Calo in the UW School of Law to better understand a law and policy perspective of her work.
“This is a very people-centric problem. If we only approach it with an engineering mindset, we may not be able to optimize for what would be helpful,” Kalavakonda said. “I strongly believe that we have to do both. We have to develop a human-centric understanding with an engineering perspective.”
Kalavakonda’s doctoral dissertation is producing a prototype and a proof of concept — proving that building this type of robot is possible. Her work then could be applied not only to neurosurgery, but also many other medical fields that might use robotics, such as orthopedics, gynecology, cardiac surgery, and retinal surgery. Her approach could also be applicable to the development of technology outside of medicine, such as self-driving cars and robotic home assistants. However, Kalavakonda’s long-term vision is to turn the prototype she has engineered into a medical product, so surgeons can someday use it in the operating room. She estimates that the timeline to real-world implementation will be approximately seven to 10 years. Once the robot is commercialized, it could be deployed in operating rooms around the world to assist surgeons. It would be useful in almost any type of surgical facility, but it could be especially valuable in remote, rural areas as well as in under-resourced communities.
A teacher, mentor and leader
[caption id="attachment_36308" align="alignright" width="560"]
Kalavakonda teleoperates the RAVEN II surgical robot, testing its ability to provide surgical suction. This performance will be compared to that of an autonomous suction algorithm designed for the robot using adaptive motion planning.[/caption]
During her time at UW ECE, Kalavakonda has been involved in a wide range of activities outside the development of her doctoral dissertation, and she has collaborated and engaged with many faculty, students, and staff. In addition to Hannaford, she has worked in various capacities with UW ECE professors Howard Chizeck, Sam Burden, and Kim Ingraham, and considers them to be mentors. She has taught her own course at UW ECE, “Models of Robot Manipulation,” where she was the listed faculty of record. She has also helped to create course content for the Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Engineering degree program in the UW College of Engineering. And she was a graduate student staff assistant in the Department, helping with the recruitment and admissions process. During this time, she started two student-led initiatives: the graduate applicant support program and virtual office hours, where prospective students could log in online and learn more about UW ECE from current graduate students. In 2019, she helped to found the UW ECE Student Advisory Committee, in 2020, she helped to launch the Department’s Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Committee, and she was part of the UW ECE Curriculum Committee this last year.
As if that all wasn’t enough, she also was founding chair for the Women in Engineering Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE, chapter at the UW, was a founding board member of the Women in Computer Vision Society, and she has spoken on panels and received an Outstanding Female Engineer award in 2023 from the Women Engineers (WE) Rise program in the UW College of Engineering. In recognition of her exemplary commitment to UW ECE and her lasting impact, Kalavakonda received a 2022 Student Impact Award from the Department.
“I’ve had a lot of community, teaching, and mentorship-related experiences at UW ECE, in addition to pursuing my research, all of which have reinforced my belief that I want to be in academia,” Kalavakonda said. “The Department has always been there for me, and it has helped me to realize a lot of my ideas and bring them into action. These things were all possible for me because there is a community of supportive staff and faculty here. Many thanks to UW ECE staff members, including Stephanie Swanson, Jennifer Huberman, and Mack Carter for helping me realize my ideas.”
Future plans
Looking ahead, after receiving her doctoral degree, Kalavakonda said that she would like to pursue a faculty position in academia, and she would like to continue the research she started at UW ECE. She is keenly interested in building human-centered technology in health care applications that will benefit people. And, specifically, she is intent on making the autonomous robotic surgical assistant she has envisioned a reality.
Pursuing a postdoctoral position that will point her in that direction and allow her to develop a skill set complementary to what she has learned at UW ECE will be Kalavakonda’s next step. She imagines that this position most likely will be outside of the medical space, but it still will be studying human-robot interaction. She also anticipates that it will help to provide her with many new tools she can apply to engineering medical devices.
Kalavakonda said that she is looking forward to eventually securing a faculty position and teaching students in that capacity. In addition to the courses she has taught at UW ECE, she has mentored many graduate, undergraduate, and high school students during her time in the Department. She said that, in addition to her research, she enjoys teaching and wants to help as many students as she can. She also noted the importance of centering people in everything she does.
“I want to keep questioning and explore and identify where the research gaps are. To do that, it’s really important to have conversations with the people we want to use our technologies,” Kalavakonda said. “I believe that building devices by including the people that you want to help will always result in better technology.”
[post_title] => Niveditha Kalavakonda — building an intelligent robot to assist surgeons
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[post_content] => Read the latest issue of The Integrator, UW ECE's annual magazine highlighting faculty and student research, alumni news, and more!
To read previous issues of The Integrator, click here.
[post_title] => The Integrator 2024–2025
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[post_content] => Article by Wayne Gillam, photos by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_35913" align="alignright" width="550"]
UW ECE Assistant Professor Kim Ingraham designs personalized, adaptive control strategies for assistive robotic devices, such as exoskeletons and powered wheelchairs. Her work involves bringing students and faculty from different backgrounds and disciplines together to move toward a common goal of producing more usable assistive robotic devices for people with disabilities.[/caption]
Millions of people have seen the Iron Man movies, in which the main character is empowered by a robotic exoskeleton. And millions more have watched the scene in Star Wars where Luke Skywalker receives a mechanical, touch-sensitive prosthetic hand that is wired into his nervous system. Because exoskeletons and smart prosthetics actually exist today, many might assume that we are only a few steps away from bringing this advanced technology we see on the movie screen into people’s everyday lives.
But the reality is that implementation of smart prosthetic systems and wearable robotics, such as exoskeletons, is not that simple. Robotic and mechanical systems can do some amazing things on their own, as this Boston Dynamics video demonstrates. But once a human being is brought into the equation, with all the complexities the human brain and body entail, it is a different story. What might appear on the surface to be a straightforward matter of creating a human-robot interface is, in reality, a difficult and complex engineering problem.
UW ECE Assistant Professor Kim Ingraham is addressing this multifaceted challenge in her lab, where she designs personalized, adaptive control strategies for exoskeletons and powered wheelchairs for young children. Her work is primarily aimed at creating usable assistive robotic devices for people with disabilities, and it is highly interdisciplinary, drawing tools and knowledge from robotics and controls, neural engineering, biomechanics, and machine learning.
"UW ECE is such a strong department in my research area. It’s a national leader in neural engineering as well as robotics and controls. And my work sits at the intersection of those two areas.” — UW ECE Assistant professor Kim Ingraham
Ingraham is also co-author of a new paper in the journal Nature, which examines ways to optimize and customize robotic assistive technologies built with humans in the device control and feedback loop. The paper brings together researchers from around the world who are working on human-in-the-loop optimization for assistive robotics. It explores over a decade of scientific research in the field, defines some of the key challenges, and highlights some of the current work being done in this area. Ingraham’s contribution to the paper draws from her doctoral research estimating energy cost using wearable sensors and including human preference as an evaluation metric for assistive robots.
“The fundamental challenge in the field is that historically we have studied the way humans naturally move and then we have built robots that can mimic that movement. But when the human is wearing the robot and they’re both in the control loop at the same time, we have to figure out ways for those systems to successfully interact,” Ingraham said. “Understanding and designing for the complexity of the interactions between the robot and the human is one of the big gaps that we still have to address.”
To help close these sorts of knowledge gaps, Ingraham oversees several different research projects that study and develop personalized, adaptive control strategies for assistive robotic devices. Although she is focused on designing assistive technologies for rehabilitation or for people with disabilities, she also works with augmentative devices, such as exoskeletons for nondisabled people, to better understand how robotic assistance impacts human motion. The engineering knowledge she gains from this research helps to inform her work and enables her team to design better device controllers.
An interdisciplinary path leads to UW ECE
[caption id="attachment_35916" align="alignright" width="500"]
Ingraham helps UW ECE doctoral student Zijie Jin put on a Biomotum SPARK ankle exoskeleton for an experiment in the UW Amplifying Movement & Performance Lab. This experiment is designed to help better understand how robotic assistance from an exoskeleton affects how participants walk, how much energy they consume, and how they feel while using the device.[/caption]
As an undergraduate student in her freshman year at Vanderbilt University, Ingraham participated in an Alternative Spring Break program, which took place at Crotched Mountain Rehabilitation Center, a rehabilitation facility for people with disabilities. There, she was exposed to technology that supported people’s mobility and other activities in their lives, such as a powered wheelchair with an attached, adaptive knitting setup that allowed the user to knit using only one hand. The experience inspired Ingraham, and she became excited about the idea of using engineering skills to build assistive technologies.
In 2012, after receiving her bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering, she went on to apply to graduate schools. Unfortunately, she wasn’t admitted on her first attempt. She said this was not because she didn’t have good grades or research experience, but because she lacked an understanding of what she calls the “hidden curriculum” required for graduate school admission. According to Ingraham, this hidden curriculum includes acquiring a deeper understanding of the graduate admissions process as well as finding effective ways to demonstrate solid academic ability and research experience.
She moved on to secure a position as a research engineer at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab (formerly the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago), where she worked from 2012 to 2015. It was there, in a hospital research setting, that Ingraham gained the knowledge and skills she needed to make it into graduate school.
“I learned everything at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. I had an absolutely phenomenal mentor, Annie Simon, and the director of our group was Levi Hargrove, and they were both incredibly supportive,” Ingraham said. “In particular, Annie taught me how to be a good researcher. She taught me things like how to conduct a good experiment, how to write a good paper, and how to be a really compassionate mentor while still maintaining high expectations.”
After three years at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, Ingraham applied to graduate school again. This time, she was admitted to the University of Michigan, where she went on to earn her master’s and doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering in 2021.
Ingraham’s interdisciplinary background ended up leading her to the UW and to UW ECE. From 2021 to 2023, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the UW Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology and Experiences, known as CREATE, with advisers in mechanical engineering and rehabilitation medicine. Toward the end of her fellowship, a colleague encouraged her to apply for an open faculty position at UW ECE because it appeared to be a good fit for her background.
“I originally thought, ‘I’m not in ECE, that doesn’t make any sense.’ But then, I started looking more in depth at the faculty and really saw how UW ECE is such a strong department in my research area,” Ingraham said. “It’s a national leader in neural engineering as well as robotics and controls. And my work sits at the intersection of those two areas.”
With that in mind, Ingraham applied, and in January 2023, she became a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department.
Research projects and collaborations
[caption id="attachment_35920" align="alignleft" width="500"]
A closeup of the Biomotum SPARK ankle exoskeleton. This device is adjustable and can be worn by children or adults.[/caption]
Ingraham’s research at UW ECE involves bringing students and faculty from different backgrounds and disciplines together to move toward a common goal of producing more usable assistive robotic devices. The ECE doctoral students in her lab have degrees from a wide range of disciplines, including chemical engineering, biomedical engineering, neuroscience, and anthropology. Ingraham said she believes this diversity of backgrounds highlights the Department’s general philosophy of expanding the definition of who can be an ECE doctoral student. She also said that these students bring multiple perspectives that contribute to her research, and they are thriving in the UW ECE doctoral program.
Ingraham collaborates with faculty in UW ECE and from different departments across the University on a wide range of research projects. She is also a core faculty member in the Amplifying Movement & Performance Lab, an interdisciplinary, experimental lab shared by faculty from the UW College of Engineering and the UW Department of Rehabilitation Medicine. One aim of her research in the AMP Lab is to design adaptive algorithms for exoskeletons. To this end, she is collaborating with UW ECE Associate Professor Sam Burden to develop game theory algorithms to customize robotic assistance from an ankle exoskeleton. In another project at the AMP Lab, she is collaborating with UW ECE Professor Chet Moritz, who holds joint appointments in rehabilitation medicine, physiology, and biophysics, and is co-director of the Center for Neurotechnology. Ingraham and Moritz are working to combine transcutaneous (on the surface of the skin) spinal stimulation with exoskeleton assistance. This is groundbreaking work primarily for adults with spinal cord injury. She is also building on her postdoctoral work at CREATE by studying how early access to powered mobility devices impacts development, language, and movement in young children. It is research that involves the “Explorer Mini,” a small, colorful, joystick-controlled, powered mobility device for toddlers. In this work, Ingraham is collaborating with her previous postdoctoral advisers, professors Kat Steele in mechanical engineering and Heather Feldner in rehabilitation medicine.
Ingraham noted that she appreciates the interdisciplinary opportunities UW ECE provides.
“Something I really value about being in our Department is how interdisciplinary it is, how someone with a nontraditional background like myself can still have an intellectual home in the ECE department, just because of how many areas ECE touches,” Ingraham said. “It was the people and research strengths that got me excited about UW ECE. I wouldn’t necessarily belong in every ECE department, but UW ECE is a really awesome fit for me.”
Work as an educator
[caption id="attachment_35922" align="alignright" width="500"]
Ingraham examines experimental biomechanics data with UW ECE doctoral student Annika Pfister as displayed by an open-source musculoskeletal modeling and simulation platform called “OpenSim.” This data was collected from a participant with a spinal cord injury who was walking. Ingraham is pointing out to Pfister the angle of the participant’s ankle onscreen[/caption]
Ingraham teaches undergraduate and graduate courses at UW ECE. She also leads a capstone course that includes both undergraduate and graduate students, the Neural Engineering Tech Studio. This is a cross-disciplinary course in UW ECE and the bioengineering department, facilitated by the Center for Neurotechnology. In the course, students design engineering prototypes based on neural engineering principles. The experience is structured to help teach students entrepreneurship skills as well as a user-centric thought process.
“I like teaching very applied courses,” Ingraham said. “I like it when students can see how what we’re doing in the classroom actually matters for real-world applications, how it manifests in research, industry, and technology we use every day.”
In addition to her duties as a researcher and an instructor, Ingraham is also chair of the UW ECE Colloquium committee. The Department’s Research Colloquium Lecture Series features research talks given by experts in electrical and computer engineering. Ingraham said that she and the committee are working hard not only to bring people in from across the nation to give these talks but also to build community in the Department through the lecture events.
For students interested in pursuing a career in robotics, Ingraham recommended learning the mathematical foundations of the field as early as possible. After gaining a firm grasp of the fundamentals, she said it was then important to find a niche within an application area to focus on. For Ingraham, that niche is assistive robotic technologies, and she noted how her professional goals and personal interests converge in this area.
“From a scientific perspective, I’m really interested in understanding how humans and wearable robots co-adapt to each other,” Ingraham said. “From a human point of view, I would really like to achieve the translation of our research into robotic systems that help people in meaningful ways — systems that can be adapted, personalized, and give people more choices in how they move around the world.”
For more information about UW ECE Assistant Professor Kim Ingraham, read her recent paper in Nature, and visit her faculty bio page or lab website.
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[post_content] => Adapted from an article by Arden Clise, UW Bioengineering
[caption id="attachment_36802" align="alignright" width="575"] 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. Photo by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE[/caption]
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. The competitive fellowship recognizes 126 promising scholars with leadership potential. Many past fellows have later earned Nobel Prizes and National Medals of Science.
Orsborn’s research is focused on understanding motor learning principles to enhance movement-restoring therapies. Her work combines engineering and neuroscience to develop brain-machine interfaces that restore, replace and augment nervous system function, particularly for movement disorders such as paralysis from spinal cord injuries or strokes. Her lab works to make these interfaces more effective by tapping into neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to adapt) and using them to better understand how learning happens in the brain.
In her Sloan Research Fellowship nomination letter, UW Bioengineering Professor and Chair Princess Imoukhuede wrote, “What makes Dr. Orsborn unique is her computational mindset, rooted in her engineering and physics background, combined with her deep expertise in experimental systems neuroscience. She performs cutting-edge experiments in non-human primates and humans using advanced computational and neurophysiological tools to reveal new insights into how neural circuits learn.”
The two-year fellowship provides awardees with $75,000 which can be applied to any expenses that supports their research endeavors. “The award will help us continue to take new risks and explore new projects,” Orsborn said. “Its support will help us go a little deeper and tackle harder questions.”
In addition to the Sloan Research Fellowship, Orsborn has received numerous awards and honors including a National Science Foundation Career Award, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) Emerging Leaders Program Award and the inaugural Washington Research Foundation – Ronald S. Howell Distinguished Faculty Fellowship.
To learn more about Prof. Orsborn and her research, visit her faculty page or lab website. This fellowship announcement is also in UW News.
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[post_content] => Adapted from an article by Arden Clise, UW Bioengineering
[caption id="attachment_36802" align="alignright" width="575"] 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. Photo by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE[/caption]
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. The competitive fellowship recognizes 126 promising scholars with leadership potential. Many past fellows have later earned Nobel Prizes and National Medals of Science.
Orsborn’s research is focused on understanding motor learning principles to enhance movement-restoring therapies. Her work combines engineering and neuroscience to develop brain-machine interfaces that restore, replace and augment nervous system function, particularly for movement disorders such as paralysis from spinal cord injuries or strokes. Her lab works to make these interfaces more effective by tapping into neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to adapt) and using them to better understand how learning happens in the brain.
In her Sloan Research Fellowship nomination letter, UW Bioengineering Professor and Chair Princess Imoukhuede wrote, “What makes Dr. Orsborn unique is her computational mindset, rooted in her engineering and physics background, combined with her deep expertise in experimental systems neuroscience. She performs cutting-edge experiments in non-human primates and humans using advanced computational and neurophysiological tools to reveal new insights into how neural circuits learn.”
The two-year fellowship provides awardees with $75,000 which can be applied to any expenses that supports their research endeavors. “The award will help us continue to take new risks and explore new projects,” Orsborn said. “Its support will help us go a little deeper and tackle harder questions.”
In addition to the Sloan Research Fellowship, Orsborn has received numerous awards and honors including a National Science Foundation Career Award, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) Emerging Leaders Program Award and the inaugural Washington Research Foundation – Ronald S. Howell Distinguished Faculty Fellowship.
To learn more about Prof. Orsborn and her research, visit her faculty page or lab website. This fellowship announcement is also in UW News.
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[post_content] => By Wayne Gillam / UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_36778" align="alignright" width="600"] UW ECE Assistant Professor Serena Eley studies superconductors and magnets, searching for ways to fine-tune the atomic disorder landscape in these materials and leverage their unique properties for quantum technology development. Photo by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE[/caption]
Imperfection and disorder are part of life. This is true, not only on the level of everyday reality with which we are most familiar, but also within all matter at the smallest scales imaginable. At the nanoscale, ordered atomic lattices that make up solid-state materials contain impurities, dislocations, bends, and vacancies in their grids. And in some materials important to engineering, such as superconductors and magnets, this disorder can actually be useful, for example, helping scientists and engineers control the motion of a nanoscale whirlpool of electrical current called a “quantum vortex.” Superconductors and magnets can host a multitude of these tiny vortices, which can be thought of as mini-tornadoes of electrical current or electron spins, swirling around, interacting with, and disrupting electrical currents within the materials.
UW ECE Assistant Professor Serena Eley studies these vortices. Her lab, the Eley Quantum Materials Group, examines superconductors and magnets, searching for ways to fine-tune the atomic disorder landscape in these materials and leverage their unique properties for quantum technology development. Her research involves finding ways to control the motion and formation of quantum vortices by optimizing defects in superconductors, work aimed at further enhancing conductivity and reducing energy loss. For example, she was recently part of an international research team that achieved the maximum critical current that has ever been measured in an iron-based superconductor to date, groundbreaking work that was described in the journal Nature Materials. Her research also includes studying defects and a vortex-like excitation in magnets called a “skyrmion.” These quasi-particles are showing promise as information carriers for spintronic devices, which encode information in the spin of an electron. Spintronic devices have proven to be useful in computing, data storage, and even biomedical applications. They also have several advantages over conventional electronics, such as faster switching speeds, higher data storage density, and lower energy consumption.
“We try to increase our fundamental understanding of superconductivity and magnetism in a way that can contribute to a wide range of applications. But when designing superconductors, we also have to consider the impact of vortices,” Eley said. “It affects all these applications. So, when designing the material or the device, we have to think about how to lessen the impact of vortices in some instances and how to maximize their effectiveness in others.”
Superconductors and magnets are already in wide use today — from magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scanners that look deep inside the body to gamma ray detectors of clandestine nuclear material to bolometers used in x-ray astronomy. They have been implemented in medical, military, security, and power applications as well as quantum computing and sensing. Because Eley’s research contributes to expanding fundamental knowledge about superconductivity and magnetism, her work could contribute to advancing technology in all of these areas. But her research is primarily aimed at the development of quantum computing systems, which show great promise for facilitating significant breakthroughs in science, medicine, and engineering.
A physicist who is also an engineer
[caption id="attachment_36780" align="alignright" width="500"] Jiangteng (Ivan) Liu, a UW doctoral student in physics, with Eley in her lab at UW ECE. Liu is drawing a magnetization loop, which describes how the current-carrying capacity of a superconductor varies with an applied magnetic field. Photo by Dennis Wise / University of Washington[/caption]
Eley became fascinated with superconductivity in elementary school, after reading an article about maglev trains, which use a combination of superconductors and magnets to achieve a stable levitation state. She realized, even at a young age, that she wanted to learn more about superconductivity and magnetism, so she set her mind toward pursuing a career in science. She attended a science and technology high school in Northern Virginia and later went on to Caltech, where she received her bachelor’s degree in physics in 2002. After graduation, she spent a year as a research assistant and a Henry Luce Scholar at the International Superconductivity Technology Center in Tokyo, Japan. She then attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where, in 2012, she earned her doctoral degree in physics.
After graduate school, Eley worked for two years at Sandia National Laboratories designing silicon-based devices composed of quantum dot nanostructures. This was followed by three years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she studied vortex dynamics in superconductors. In 2018, she accepted a position as an assistant professor of physics at the Colorado School of Mines. And in January 2023, she joined UW ECE as a tenure-track assistant professor. Eley said she made the move to UW ECE because of the number and caliber of graduate students in the Department as well as access to state-of-the-art facilities, such as those available at the Washington Nanofabrication Facility and the UW Molecular Engineering Materials Center.
“I’m in an electrical engineering department, but I definitely think like a physicist because that’s my background,” Eley said. “In physics, you’re usually trying to develop fundamental knowledge, rather than design a device or a system. But my research has always been forward thinking in terms of exploring how fundamental properties connect to applications, so it ends up working well in an electrical engineering department.”
In addition to the Luce award, Eley received the John Bardeen award at the University of Illinois for her doctoral dissertation, which explored proximity effects and vortex dynamics in nanostructured superconductors. She also has received many other awards and honors, such as a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Joseph A. Johnson III Award for Excellence, a Goddard Award for Best Research Contribution at the NASA Academy Goddard Space Flight Center, and a Cottrell Scholars Award.
The Eley Quantum Materials Group
[caption id="attachment_36783" align="alignright" width="500"] Members of the Eley Quantum Materials Group in Ely’s lab at UW ECE. From left to right: Chris Matsumura, UW doctoral student in physics; Rohin Tangirala, UW ECE doctoral student; Chaman Gupta (on ladder), UW doctoral student in materials science and engineering; UW ECE Assistant Professor Serena Eley; Raahul Potluri (BSEE ‘24), UW ECE post baccalaureate student; Jiangteng (Ivan) Liu, UW doctoral student in physics. Photo by Dennis Wise / University of Washington[/caption]
Eley’s lab at UW ECE includes undergraduate and graduate students from a range of disciplines, including electrical and computer engineering, physics, and materials science. Her UW collaborators include Jiun-Haw Chu, an associate professor in the physics department, who creates high-quality superconducting and magnetic materials for Eley’s research experiments. Eley is also a faculty member of the Institute for Nano-Engineered Systems and QuantumX at the University.
Eley’s specialty is vortex physics, and the overarching goal of her research is to study the effects of disorder on the electronic and magnetic properties of quantum materials and devices. To this end, she and her research team study vortex dynamics in superconductors, the effects of disorder on skyrmion dynamics in magnetic materials, and energy loss mechanisms in superconducting quantum circuits. Eley is also leading a concerted effort to move toward predictive design in a field that has traditionally relied on trial and error to discover and improve superconducting and magnetic materials.
“In an ideal world, we would be able to improve our understanding of vortex physics enough that we could, based on some basic parameters of the material, design the optimal defect landscape without so much trial and error,” Eley said. “For example, in different superconductors and based on each material’s properties, we want to figure out what the ideal disorder landscape might look like, so we can maximize the current-carrying capacity of the material.”
A dedicated educator
[caption id="attachment_36785" align="alignright" width="500"] Eley with students, standing next to a magnetometer in her lab. The group is discussing magnetic phases in iron-based superconducting crystals and corresponding effects on the motion of superconducting quantum vortices in the material. Photo by Dennis Wise / University of Washington[/caption]
Eley teaches undergraduate and graduate-level courses at UW ECE. She has also worked with Department staff members May Lim, director of industry and professional programs, and Rebecca Carlson, career and industry programs manager, to start a UW ECE Industry Mentors program. Many leading companies, such as Boeing, Airbus, Intel, and Rigetti Computing are participating. This effort connects undergraduates with mentors who are working in fields related to the students’ career interests. She noted that students are not usually given this sort of opportunity until they are seniors, at which point it is too late for them to go back and select courses related to their mentorship experience.
“I think it’s important to connect freshman and sophomore-level undergraduates with mentors who are actively working in their goal fields,” Eley said. “These professionals are best positioned to provide students with up-to-date advice on what they should be doing and what courses they should be taking to create a strong academic profile for career goals.”
Eley said that she enjoys teaching and the challenge of explaining complex topics to students. She also has some advice for them. For undergraduates, she recommends that every summer be spent in an internship. This provides opportunities to try out different working environments long before choosing a job. For graduate students, she advises them to focus on one project or research direction and prove their ability by getting results. More specifically, she said it is important for graduate students to demonstrate their technical capabilities, scientific communication skills, and analytical ability (being able to extract the science from their technical accomplishments) before moving on to seek professional development opportunities.
As exemplified by her advice to students, quantum science and engineering is a field that requires rigorous discipline. And Eley is no stranger to a disciplined approach professionally or personally. Outside of the UW, she spends much of her free time training for 100-mile ultramarathons. In 2024, she completed the Hardrock Hundred Mile Endurance Run, which summits multiple 13,000-foot peaks in southern Colorado, and the Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc in Chamonix, France, which winds its way for 110 miles through France, Switzerland, and Italy. Other notable performances include finishing as the third-fastest female runner in the 2023 Grindstone Trail Running Festival in Virginia’s Allegheny Mountains and the second-fastest female in the 2017 Angeles Crest 100 Mile Endurance Run in the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles.
Running 100-mile races takes grit, determination, and a special kind of love for an uncommon interest. It could be argued that these character traits lend themselves well to quantum science and engineering. Building a successful career in this field also takes a special interest and discipline. It perhaps even benefits from a sense of awe and fascination with the subject matter, much like what Eley has demonstrated since childhood.
“I think I will always be fascinated by superconductivity. I understand the math, but still, it can be hard to fully comprehend,” Eley said. “It’s like flying in an airplane. You may understand the concept of lift and the supporting mathematics. But still, it’s pretty amazing to realize that a plane can fly without falling. That’s how I feel about superconductivity.”
For more information about UW ECE Assistant Professor Serena Eley, her research, and work as an educator, visit her bio page.
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[post_date] => 2025-02-03 14:26:02
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[post_content] => By Wayne Gillam / UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_36551" align="alignright" width="600"] UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar and his students have collaborated with Princeton University to build a new type of compact camera engineered for computer vision. Their prototype (shown above) uses optics for computing, significantly reducing power consumption and enabling the camera to identify objects at the speed of light. Photo by Ilya Chugunov, courtesy of Princeton University[/caption]
Collaboration can be a beautiful thing, especially when people work together to create something new. Take, for example, a longstanding collaboration between Arka Majumdar, a UW professor in electrical and computer engineering and physics, and Felix Heide, an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton University. Together, they and their students have produced some eye-popping and groundbreaking research, including shrinking a camera down to the size of a grain of salt while still capturing crisp, clear images.
Now, the pair is building on this work, recently publishing a paper in Science Advances that describes a new kind of compact camera engineered for computer vision — a type of artificial intelligence that allows computers to recognize objects in images and video. Majumdar and Heide’s research prototype uses optics for computing, significantly reducing power consumption and enabling the camera to identify objects at the speed of light. Their device also represents a new approach to the field of computer vision.
“This is a completely new way of thinking about optics, which is very different from traditional optics. It’s end-to-end design, where the optics are designed in conjunction with the computational block,” Majumdar said. “Here, we replaced the camera lens with engineered optics, which allows us to put a lot of the computation into the optics.”
[caption id="attachment_36593" align="alignleft" width="350"] Majumdar (left) and Felix Heide, an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton University. Photos by Ryan Hoover (UW ECE) and Steven Schultz (Princeton University)[/caption]
“There are really broad applications for this research, from self-driving cars, self-driving trucks and other robotics to medical devices and smartphones. Nowadays, every iPhone has AI or vision technology in it,” added Heide, who was the principal investigator and senior author of the Science Advances paper. “This work is still at a very early stage, but all of these applications could someday benefit from what we are developing.”
Heide and his students at Princeton provided the design for the camera prototype, which is a compact, optical computing chip. Majumdar contributed his expertise in optics to help engineer the camera, and he and his students fabricated the chip in the Washington Nanofabrication Laboratory. The UW side of this multi-institutional research team included Johannes Froech, a UW ECE postdoctoral scholar, and James Whitehead (Ph.D. ‘22), who was a UW ECE doctoral student in Majumdar’s lab when this research took place.
Replacing a camera lens with engineered optics
[caption id="attachment_36554" align="alignright" width="500"] Instead of using a traditional camera lens made out of glass or plastic, the optics in this camera relies on layers of 50 meta-lenses — flat, lightweight optical components that use microscopic nanostructures to manipulate light. These meta-lenses fit into a compact, optical computing chip (shown above), which was fabricated in the Washington Nanofabrication Laboratory by Majumdar and his students. Photo by Ilya Chugunov, courtesy of Princeton University[/caption]
Instead of using a traditional camera lens made out of glass or plastic, the optics in this camera relies on layers of 50 meta-lenses — flat, lightweight optical components that use microscopic nanostructures to manipulate light. The meta-lenses also function as an optical neural network, which is a computer system that is a form of artificial intelligence modeled on the human brain. This unique approach has a couple of key advantages. First, it’s fast. Because much of the computation takes place at the speed of light, the system can identify and classify images more than 200 times faster than neural networks that use conventional computer hardware, and with comparable accuracy. Second, because the optics in the camera rely on incoming light to operate, rather than electricity, the power consumption is greatly reduced.
“Our idea was to use some of the work that Arka pioneered on metasurfaces to bring some of those computations that are traditionally done electronically into the optics at the speed of light,” Heide said. “By doing so, we produced a new computer vision system that performs a lot of the computation optically.”
Majumdar and Heide say that they intend to continue their collaboration. Next steps for this research include further iterations, evolving the prototype so it is more relevant for autonomous navigation in self-driving vehicles. This is an application area they both have identified as promising. They also plan to work with more complex data sets and problems that take greater computing power to solve, such as object detection (locating specific objects within an image), which is an important feature for computer vision.
“Right now, this optical computing system is a research prototype, and it works for one particular application,” Majumdar said. “However, we see it eventually becoming broadly applicable to many technologies. That, of course, remains to be seen, but here, we demonstrated the first step. And it is a big step forward compared to all other existing optical implementations of neural networks.”
The article, “Spatially varying nanophotonic neural networks,” was published Nov. 8 in Science Advances. In addition to Majumdar, Froech, Whitehead, and Heide, co-authors include Kaixuan Wei, Xiao Li, Praneeth Chakravarthula, and Ethan Tseng. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Packard Foundation Fellowship, a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Disney Research Award, a Bosch Research Award, an Amazon Science Research Award, a Google Ph.D. Fellowship, and Project X, an innovation fund of Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.
[post_title] => A camera that can identify objects at the speed of light
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[post_content] => Article by Wayne Gillam, Photos by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_36294" align="alignright" width="565"] 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. Kalavakonda is also a 2024 Yang Award recipient, has received numerous other awards and honors during her time in the Department, and she is exceptionally engaged with faculty, students, and staff.[/caption]
If one were to try to imagine a robot in a medical setting, it could bring to mind images from science fiction movies, such as Star Wars, where medical droids work alongside doctors and surgeons to heal their patients. And in fact, it was imagery such as this that first inspired UW ECE doctoral student Niveditha (Nivii) Kalavakonda, who became fascinated with robotics at an early age through science fiction books and movies.
“I knew early on that I wanted to be in robotics, and I figured that studying engineering would be the obvious step to move into that space,” Kalavakonda said. “I also thought electrical engineering sounded like a good place to be because it would provide me with insight into both software and hardware.”
Kalavakonda was also introduced to medical settings at a young age. Growing up in Chennai, India, as the daughter of a neurosurgeon, she witnessed the impact of her father’s work through many grateful patients, some of whom remained in contact with him decades after their surgeries were complete. Given this background, it’s perhaps not surprising that today, Kalavakonda is building her own robot at UW ECE, one that is infused with artificial intelligence and engineered to work alongside surgeons.
But the road from India to UW ECE had a few twists and turns along the way. After high school, Kalavakonda chose to pursue a degree in electronics and communications engineering at the Amrita School of Engineering in Coimbatore, India. She studied circuits and basic control systems there, but the school’s engineering program did not focus on robotics or research as much as she would have liked. However, after receiving her bachelor’s degree in 2014, she spent a pivotal year at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, where she worked in the lab of Professor Asokan Thondiyath. There, she was exposed to research in different areas of robotics. In a fortuitous twist of fate, she was tasked with working in virtual reality and building a simulator for a surgical robotic arm that the lab was developing. Kalavakonda said she felt immediately drawn to the project because she saw the potential impact it could have on shaping healthcare in India.
“I fully expect that Nivii’s work will actually help to launch a new subfield, surgical human-robot interaction, as a new community within both the HRI and surgical robotics communities.” — UW ECE Professor Blake Hannaford
It was in Thondiyath’s lab that Kalavakonda came across research by UW ECE Professor Blake Hannaford, who later became her adviser throughout her graduate studies. Kalavakonda had been admitted to several graduate schools after receiving her bachelor’s degree, but she said that she ended up choosing UW ECE because Hannaford’s lab had valuable collaborations with medical institutions. She also was drawn to the fact that Hannaford and his graduate students in the UW BioRobotics Laboratory built hardware like the RAVEN surgical robot. In 2015, Kalavakonda moved to Seattle and started working toward her master’s degree at UW ECE with Hannaford as her adviser. And in 2016, she joined the UW BioRobotics Lab. The following year, she was accepted into the Department’s doctoral degree program.
[caption id="attachment_36300" align="alignleft" width="560"] This photo and the one below shows Kalavakonda setting up a collaborative human-robot interaction experiment designed to have a surgeon and a robot perform tasks in parallel to achieve a shared goal. Here, the RAVEN grasper tool was retrofitted with a suction device to operate within a laparoscopic surgery training task. The surgeon performs a peg transfer sequence while the robot autonomously clears away simulated bleeding points.[/caption]
During her time as a graduate student at UW ECE, Kalavakonda has been involved in several projects aimed at bringing leading-edge technologies into medical settings. These projects included working in the UW Amplifying Movement & Performance Lab on providing haptic feedback to users of a myoelectric prosthesis (an artificial limb that uses electrical signals from muscles in the remaining limb to move), developing software for the Microsoft HoloLens that could help surgeons at UW Medicine precisely locate tumors to be excised from the body, and developing remote calibration for cochlear implants at Seattle Children’s Hospital. She also has held internships at Apple, Amazon, and Nvidia, which expanded her knowledge and experience in artificial intelligence, robotics, and computer vision.
Kalavakonda received her master’s degree in electrical engineering from UW ECE in 2017, and she expects to graduate with her doctoral degree from the Department at the end of winter quarter 2025. She has already received many awards and honors for her work and engagement in the Department, but it’s the topic of her doctoral dissertation that has perhaps created the greatest buzz.
“Nivii came to the UW with an exciting background in virtual reality programming. She very quickly dove into a medical application of augmented reality, and her dissertation represents her ambitious vision of an autonomous robotic assistant for neurosurgery,” Hannaford said. “I fully expect that Nivii’s work will actually help to launch a new subfield, surgical human-robot interaction, as a new community within both the HRI and surgical robotics communities.”
Yang Award for Outstanding Doctoral Student
[caption id="attachment_36304" align="alignright" width="560"] Kalavakonda, alongside UW mechanical engineering graduate student Tin Chiang (left) and UW ECE doctoral student Hoanan Peng (right), set up a teleoperation experiment for the RAVEN II surgical robot.[/caption]
In May 2024, Kalavakonda received the Yang Award for Outstanding Doctoral Student at UW ECE for researching human-robot interaction designed for healthcare environments and for building community in the Department through various leadership initiatives. The Yang Award recognizes a UW ECE doctoral student in their final year of study who has conducted outstanding research in the field of electrical and computer engineering as evidenced by their publications or recognized by outside researchers in the field.
The Yang Award was established by successful entrepreneur and former UW ECE faculty member Andrew T. Yang, who has been one of the most influential people in the electronic design automation industry for nearly three decades. Yang is known for being a visionary in both research and entrepreneurship. The purpose of the award is to recognize and encourage outstanding doctoral student research contributions to the field of electrical engineering. The award goes to one qualifying student per year and is open to all doctoral degree candidates in UW ECE. Receiving the Yang Award is considered a high honor and helps to create career opportunities for the recipient.
“It’s reaffirming to hear from the leaders of our Department that I’m doing good research that they believe in, and it helps me to believe in my research a little bit more,” Kalavakonda said. “The award also has helped me realize that academia is where I want to be.”
In addition to the Yang Award, Kalavakonda has received several other honors during her time at UW ECE, including being named this year as one of the Husky 100 — a group of top students at the UW. She also was a part of the Robotics Science and Systems Pioneers Cohort in 2021, received an Irene Peden Fellowship in 2022, and was named an Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Rising Star in 2023. And it was an Amazon Catalyst Fellowship award she received in 2017 that gave her an opportunity to put the thesis of her doctoral dissertation into action, launching her development of an intelligent robot that could assist a surgeon.
An autonomous robotic assistant for surgical suction
[caption id="attachment_36312" align="alignright" width="560"] A closeup showing pegs, beads, and artificial blood used to test the robot’s ability to provide suction alongside a surgeon in a tight operating environment.[/caption]
Robotic surgery has many advantages for patients, including minimal invasion, reduced risk of infection, faster recovery time, and lessened scarring. Robots also have increased dexterity and vision capabilities as compared to humans, especially in hard-to-reach places inside the human body. In the medical field today, there are already robots operating as extensions of surgeons’ hands as well as robotic systems being developed for entirely automated processes. However, Kalavakonda’s research is focused on building a robot that can understand the surgical environment and the people in it while operating independently. This robot will perform assistive tasks alongside surgeons, identifying and performing dynamic actions without interfering with the surgeon’s physical motions or tools during surgery. This work is made possible through close collaboration with Dr. Laligam Sekhar and his fellows at the Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.
To move toward this ambitious goal, Kalavakonda has developed software for the RAVEN surgical robot that empowers the device to perform a very specific task during neurosurgery— applying suction upon request, removing spots of blood that might block a surgeon’s vision. Because this is brain surgery, the robot is operating in a very narrow field of view of one to two centimeters in diameter. The software helps the robot to understand this tiny surgical scene through computer vision and take actions using trajectory prediction.
Kalavakonda’s software also allows the robot to adapt to different surgeons and their behavior patterns while operating. To make this possible, Kalavakonda has created adaptive AI learning models to help the robot learn the environment, infer the surgeon’s intent, and not bump into surgical tools or the surroundings. This work has required Kalavakonda and her colleagues to dig deep into existing human-robot interaction research and conduct extensive user studies examining specific human behaviors in surgical environments. She also collaborates with the UW Science, Technology & Society Studies Certificate Program to study the changes in surgical team dynamics caused by different levels of automation in surgical robotics, and she confers with Professor Ryan Calo in the UW School of Law to better understand a law and policy perspective of her work.
“This is a very people-centric problem. If we only approach it with an engineering mindset, we may not be able to optimize for what would be helpful,” Kalavakonda said. “I strongly believe that we have to do both. We have to develop a human-centric understanding with an engineering perspective.”
Kalavakonda’s doctoral dissertation is producing a prototype and a proof of concept — proving that building this type of robot is possible. Her work then could be applied not only to neurosurgery, but also many other medical fields that might use robotics, such as orthopedics, gynecology, cardiac surgery, and retinal surgery. Her approach could also be applicable to the development of technology outside of medicine, such as self-driving cars and robotic home assistants. However, Kalavakonda’s long-term vision is to turn the prototype she has engineered into a medical product, so surgeons can someday use it in the operating room. She estimates that the timeline to real-world implementation will be approximately seven to 10 years. Once the robot is commercialized, it could be deployed in operating rooms around the world to assist surgeons. It would be useful in almost any type of surgical facility, but it could be especially valuable in remote, rural areas as well as in under-resourced communities.
A teacher, mentor and leader
[caption id="attachment_36308" align="alignright" width="560"] Kalavakonda teleoperates the RAVEN II surgical robot, testing its ability to provide surgical suction. This performance will be compared to that of an autonomous suction algorithm designed for the robot using adaptive motion planning.[/caption]
During her time at UW ECE, Kalavakonda has been involved in a wide range of activities outside the development of her doctoral dissertation, and she has collaborated and engaged with many faculty, students, and staff. In addition to Hannaford, she has worked in various capacities with UW ECE professors Howard Chizeck, Sam Burden, and Kim Ingraham, and considers them to be mentors. She has taught her own course at UW ECE, “Models of Robot Manipulation,” where she was the listed faculty of record. She has also helped to create course content for the Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Engineering degree program in the UW College of Engineering. And she was a graduate student staff assistant in the Department, helping with the recruitment and admissions process. During this time, she started two student-led initiatives: the graduate applicant support program and virtual office hours, where prospective students could log in online and learn more about UW ECE from current graduate students. In 2019, she helped to found the UW ECE Student Advisory Committee, in 2020, she helped to launch the Department’s Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Committee, and she was part of the UW ECE Curriculum Committee this last year.
As if that all wasn’t enough, she also was founding chair for the Women in Engineering Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE, chapter at the UW, was a founding board member of the Women in Computer Vision Society, and she has spoken on panels and received an Outstanding Female Engineer award in 2023 from the Women Engineers (WE) Rise program in the UW College of Engineering. In recognition of her exemplary commitment to UW ECE and her lasting impact, Kalavakonda received a 2022 Student Impact Award from the Department.
“I’ve had a lot of community, teaching, and mentorship-related experiences at UW ECE, in addition to pursuing my research, all of which have reinforced my belief that I want to be in academia,” Kalavakonda said. “The Department has always been there for me, and it has helped me to realize a lot of my ideas and bring them into action. These things were all possible for me because there is a community of supportive staff and faculty here. Many thanks to UW ECE staff members, including Stephanie Swanson, Jennifer Huberman, and Mack Carter for helping me realize my ideas.”
Future plans
Looking ahead, after receiving her doctoral degree, Kalavakonda said that she would like to pursue a faculty position in academia, and she would like to continue the research she started at UW ECE. She is keenly interested in building human-centered technology in health care applications that will benefit people. And, specifically, she is intent on making the autonomous robotic surgical assistant she has envisioned a reality.
Pursuing a postdoctoral position that will point her in that direction and allow her to develop a skill set complementary to what she has learned at UW ECE will be Kalavakonda’s next step. She imagines that this position most likely will be outside of the medical space, but it still will be studying human-robot interaction. She also anticipates that it will help to provide her with many new tools she can apply to engineering medical devices.
Kalavakonda said that she is looking forward to eventually securing a faculty position and teaching students in that capacity. In addition to the courses she has taught at UW ECE, she has mentored many graduate, undergraduate, and high school students during her time in the Department. She said that, in addition to her research, she enjoys teaching and wants to help as many students as she can. She also noted the importance of centering people in everything she does.
“I want to keep questioning and explore and identify where the research gaps are. To do that, it’s really important to have conversations with the people we want to use our technologies,” Kalavakonda said. “I believe that building devices by including the people that you want to help will always result in better technology.”
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[post_date] => 2025-01-02 11:25:01
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[post_content] => Read the latest issue of The Integrator, UW ECE's annual magazine highlighting faculty and student research, alumni news, and more!
To read previous issues of The Integrator, click here.
[post_title] => The Integrator 2024–2025
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[post_date] => 2024-12-19 14:55:32
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[post_content] => Article by Wayne Gillam, photos by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_35913" align="alignright" width="550"] UW ECE Assistant Professor Kim Ingraham designs personalized, adaptive control strategies for assistive robotic devices, such as exoskeletons and powered wheelchairs. Her work involves bringing students and faculty from different backgrounds and disciplines together to move toward a common goal of producing more usable assistive robotic devices for people with disabilities.[/caption]
Millions of people have seen the Iron Man movies, in which the main character is empowered by a robotic exoskeleton. And millions more have watched the scene in Star Wars where Luke Skywalker receives a mechanical, touch-sensitive prosthetic hand that is wired into his nervous system. Because exoskeletons and smart prosthetics actually exist today, many might assume that we are only a few steps away from bringing this advanced technology we see on the movie screen into people’s everyday lives.
But the reality is that implementation of smart prosthetic systems and wearable robotics, such as exoskeletons, is not that simple. Robotic and mechanical systems can do some amazing things on their own, as this Boston Dynamics video demonstrates. But once a human being is brought into the equation, with all the complexities the human brain and body entail, it is a different story. What might appear on the surface to be a straightforward matter of creating a human-robot interface is, in reality, a difficult and complex engineering problem.
UW ECE Assistant Professor Kim Ingraham is addressing this multifaceted challenge in her lab, where she designs personalized, adaptive control strategies for exoskeletons and powered wheelchairs for young children. Her work is primarily aimed at creating usable assistive robotic devices for people with disabilities, and it is highly interdisciplinary, drawing tools and knowledge from robotics and controls, neural engineering, biomechanics, and machine learning.
"UW ECE is such a strong department in my research area. It’s a national leader in neural engineering as well as robotics and controls. And my work sits at the intersection of those two areas.” — UW ECE Assistant professor Kim Ingraham
Ingraham is also co-author of a new paper in the journal Nature, which examines ways to optimize and customize robotic assistive technologies built with humans in the device control and feedback loop. The paper brings together researchers from around the world who are working on human-in-the-loop optimization for assistive robotics. It explores over a decade of scientific research in the field, defines some of the key challenges, and highlights some of the current work being done in this area. Ingraham’s contribution to the paper draws from her doctoral research estimating energy cost using wearable sensors and including human preference as an evaluation metric for assistive robots.
“The fundamental challenge in the field is that historically we have studied the way humans naturally move and then we have built robots that can mimic that movement. But when the human is wearing the robot and they’re both in the control loop at the same time, we have to figure out ways for those systems to successfully interact,” Ingraham said. “Understanding and designing for the complexity of the interactions between the robot and the human is one of the big gaps that we still have to address.”
To help close these sorts of knowledge gaps, Ingraham oversees several different research projects that study and develop personalized, adaptive control strategies for assistive robotic devices. Although she is focused on designing assistive technologies for rehabilitation or for people with disabilities, she also works with augmentative devices, such as exoskeletons for nondisabled people, to better understand how robotic assistance impacts human motion. The engineering knowledge she gains from this research helps to inform her work and enables her team to design better device controllers.
An interdisciplinary path leads to UW ECE
[caption id="attachment_35916" align="alignright" width="500"] Ingraham helps UW ECE doctoral student Zijie Jin put on a Biomotum SPARK ankle exoskeleton for an experiment in the UW Amplifying Movement & Performance Lab. This experiment is designed to help better understand how robotic assistance from an exoskeleton affects how participants walk, how much energy they consume, and how they feel while using the device.[/caption]
As an undergraduate student in her freshman year at Vanderbilt University, Ingraham participated in an Alternative Spring Break program, which took place at Crotched Mountain Rehabilitation Center, a rehabilitation facility for people with disabilities. There, she was exposed to technology that supported people’s mobility and other activities in their lives, such as a powered wheelchair with an attached, adaptive knitting setup that allowed the user to knit using only one hand. The experience inspired Ingraham, and she became excited about the idea of using engineering skills to build assistive technologies.
In 2012, after receiving her bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering, she went on to apply to graduate schools. Unfortunately, she wasn’t admitted on her first attempt. She said this was not because she didn’t have good grades or research experience, but because she lacked an understanding of what she calls the “hidden curriculum” required for graduate school admission. According to Ingraham, this hidden curriculum includes acquiring a deeper understanding of the graduate admissions process as well as finding effective ways to demonstrate solid academic ability and research experience.
She moved on to secure a position as a research engineer at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab (formerly the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago), where she worked from 2012 to 2015. It was there, in a hospital research setting, that Ingraham gained the knowledge and skills she needed to make it into graduate school.
“I learned everything at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. I had an absolutely phenomenal mentor, Annie Simon, and the director of our group was Levi Hargrove, and they were both incredibly supportive,” Ingraham said. “In particular, Annie taught me how to be a good researcher. She taught me things like how to conduct a good experiment, how to write a good paper, and how to be a really compassionate mentor while still maintaining high expectations.”
After three years at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, Ingraham applied to graduate school again. This time, she was admitted to the University of Michigan, where she went on to earn her master’s and doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering in 2021.
Ingraham’s interdisciplinary background ended up leading her to the UW and to UW ECE. From 2021 to 2023, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the UW Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology and Experiences, known as CREATE, with advisers in mechanical engineering and rehabilitation medicine. Toward the end of her fellowship, a colleague encouraged her to apply for an open faculty position at UW ECE because it appeared to be a good fit for her background.
“I originally thought, ‘I’m not in ECE, that doesn’t make any sense.’ But then, I started looking more in depth at the faculty and really saw how UW ECE is such a strong department in my research area,” Ingraham said. “It’s a national leader in neural engineering as well as robotics and controls. And my work sits at the intersection of those two areas.”
With that in mind, Ingraham applied, and in January 2023, she became a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department.
Research projects and collaborations
[caption id="attachment_35920" align="alignleft" width="500"] A closeup of the Biomotum SPARK ankle exoskeleton. This device is adjustable and can be worn by children or adults.[/caption]
Ingraham’s research at UW ECE involves bringing students and faculty from different backgrounds and disciplines together to move toward a common goal of producing more usable assistive robotic devices. The ECE doctoral students in her lab have degrees from a wide range of disciplines, including chemical engineering, biomedical engineering, neuroscience, and anthropology. Ingraham said she believes this diversity of backgrounds highlights the Department’s general philosophy of expanding the definition of who can be an ECE doctoral student. She also said that these students bring multiple perspectives that contribute to her research, and they are thriving in the UW ECE doctoral program.
Ingraham collaborates with faculty in UW ECE and from different departments across the University on a wide range of research projects. She is also a core faculty member in the Amplifying Movement & Performance Lab, an interdisciplinary, experimental lab shared by faculty from the UW College of Engineering and the UW Department of Rehabilitation Medicine. One aim of her research in the AMP Lab is to design adaptive algorithms for exoskeletons. To this end, she is collaborating with UW ECE Associate Professor Sam Burden to develop game theory algorithms to customize robotic assistance from an ankle exoskeleton. In another project at the AMP Lab, she is collaborating with UW ECE Professor Chet Moritz, who holds joint appointments in rehabilitation medicine, physiology, and biophysics, and is co-director of the Center for Neurotechnology. Ingraham and Moritz are working to combine transcutaneous (on the surface of the skin) spinal stimulation with exoskeleton assistance. This is groundbreaking work primarily for adults with spinal cord injury. She is also building on her postdoctoral work at CREATE by studying how early access to powered mobility devices impacts development, language, and movement in young children. It is research that involves the “Explorer Mini,” a small, colorful, joystick-controlled, powered mobility device for toddlers. In this work, Ingraham is collaborating with her previous postdoctoral advisers, professors Kat Steele in mechanical engineering and Heather Feldner in rehabilitation medicine.
Ingraham noted that she appreciates the interdisciplinary opportunities UW ECE provides.
“Something I really value about being in our Department is how interdisciplinary it is, how someone with a nontraditional background like myself can still have an intellectual home in the ECE department, just because of how many areas ECE touches,” Ingraham said. “It was the people and research strengths that got me excited about UW ECE. I wouldn’t necessarily belong in every ECE department, but UW ECE is a really awesome fit for me.”
Work as an educator
[caption id="attachment_35922" align="alignright" width="500"] Ingraham examines experimental biomechanics data with UW ECE doctoral student Annika Pfister as displayed by an open-source musculoskeletal modeling and simulation platform called “OpenSim.” This data was collected from a participant with a spinal cord injury who was walking. Ingraham is pointing out to Pfister the angle of the participant’s ankle onscreen[/caption]
Ingraham teaches undergraduate and graduate courses at UW ECE. She also leads a capstone course that includes both undergraduate and graduate students, the Neural Engineering Tech Studio. This is a cross-disciplinary course in UW ECE and the bioengineering department, facilitated by the Center for Neurotechnology. In the course, students design engineering prototypes based on neural engineering principles. The experience is structured to help teach students entrepreneurship skills as well as a user-centric thought process.
“I like teaching very applied courses,” Ingraham said. “I like it when students can see how what we’re doing in the classroom actually matters for real-world applications, how it manifests in research, industry, and technology we use every day.”
In addition to her duties as a researcher and an instructor, Ingraham is also chair of the UW ECE Colloquium committee. The Department’s Research Colloquium Lecture Series features research talks given by experts in electrical and computer engineering. Ingraham said that she and the committee are working hard not only to bring people in from across the nation to give these talks but also to build community in the Department through the lecture events.
For students interested in pursuing a career in robotics, Ingraham recommended learning the mathematical foundations of the field as early as possible. After gaining a firm grasp of the fundamentals, she said it was then important to find a niche within an application area to focus on. For Ingraham, that niche is assistive robotic technologies, and she noted how her professional goals and personal interests converge in this area.
“From a scientific perspective, I’m really interested in understanding how humans and wearable robots co-adapt to each other,” Ingraham said. “From a human point of view, I would really like to achieve the translation of our research into robotic systems that help people in meaningful ways — systems that can be adapted, personalized, and give people more choices in how they move around the world.”
For more information about UW ECE Assistant Professor Kim Ingraham, read her recent paper in Nature, and visit her faculty bio page or lab website.
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