Biosystems

person manipulating biomedical device remotely

photo by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE

Overview

Biosystems research in UW’s Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering is a highly collaborative endeavor. Our faculty focus on four areas of Biosystems research: synthetic & systems biology, neural engineering, biomedical devices, and mobile health. Many of our faculty hold secondary appointments and work closely with collaborators from other departments including Bioengineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Biology, Genome Sciences, Applied Mathematics, and the UW Medical Center. Our Biosystems faculty work with many cross-disciplinary institutes such as the eScience Institute, the Center for Neurotechnology, the Institute for Protein Design, and the Bloedel Hearing Research Center.

Topics

Synthetic Biology

Biotechnology, macromolecular engineering tools, advanced materials, genetic engineering, computer aided design, laboratory automation, DNA/RNA sequence assembly, information theory and machine learning for genomics applications.

Faculty: Eric Klavins, Georg Seelig, Jeff Bilmes

Neural Engineering

Neural Control, Brain-Computer Interfaces, Neural Security, Device control, spinal cord rehabilitation, neural signaling, neuromechanics and computational neuroscience.

Faculty: Blake Hannaford, Sam Burden, Eli Shlizerman, Joshua R. Smith, Azadeh Yazdan-Shamorad, Amy Orsborn, Chet Moritz

Medical Devices

Design of biomedical devices including research and clinical neural interfaces, diagnostic devices, wearable sensors, and embedded processing and wireless communication links for biomedical devices.

Faculty: Shwetak N. Patel, Joshua R. Smith, Matt Reynolds, Jacques Christophe Rudell, Blake Hannaford, Azadeh Yazdan-Shamorad, Amy Orsborn, Chet Moritz

Mobile Health

Development of new health monitoring, diagnostics, and health management applications and tools using emerging mobile devices and sensors. Research in this area applies advances in imaging, app development, physiological modeling, statistical algorithms, and machine learning. This work has implications for home health monitoring and low-resource environments.

Faculty: Shwetak N. Patel, Joshua R. Smith, Matt Reynolds, Linda G. Shapiro

Latest News

Two student speakers selected for UW ECE Graduation

UW ECE is proud to announce that Khushbu Patel (MSECE ‘26) and Kathryn Fehme (BSECE ‘26) have been selected to speak at this year's Graduation Ceremony.

UW ECE undergraduate Anders Pearson awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

UW ECE undergraduate student Anders Pearson has been awarded a fellowship by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). The NSF GRFP recognizes outstanding graduate students pursuing research-based degrees in STEM.

UW research team applies game theory to create a new framework for neural interface design

A research team led by UW ECE professors Amy Orsborn and Sam Burden has used game theory to create a new computational framework for neural interfaces that can adapt to the user — offering a new approach to improving human-machine interaction.

A smart glove with its own sense of touch

UW ECE doctoral student Devin Murphy, working in the lab of Assistant Professor Yiyue Luo and collaborating with MIT, has created OpenTouch Glove — a cost-effective, accessible, tactile sensing glove based on flexible printed circuit board technology.

The Integrator 2025–2026

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 graduate student Mingfei Chen receives 2025 Google PhD Fellowship for pioneering AI research

UW ECE doctoral student Mingfei Chen has been awarded a 2025 Google PhD Fellowship in Machine Perception. This award is one of the most competitive honors for doctoral students in artificial intelligence research today.