Electrical Engineering in Biology

Nine members of the Department’s faculty conduct research related to biology.  Projects include synthetic biology, biofluidics MEMS, sensing of biomolecules in breath, environmental sensing, processing of functional magnetic resonance images and speech recognition, bioinformatics and biomimetic compute architecture, and electronic skin.

Bradley W. Dickinson
Signal processing in physiological systems.
M.T. Moskowitz, B.W. Dickinson, “Stochastic resonance in speech recognition: differentiating between /b/ and /v/,” IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, 2002, pp. 855-858.

Claire Gmachl
Mid-infrared spectroscopy for trace chemicals in breath allows diagnostics and monitoring of illnesses such as kidney and liver disease, oxidative stress, or diabetes.  Spectroscopy of tissue and liquids target proteins, and tissue respiration and oxygenation. 
C. Roller, A. A. Kosterev, F. K. Tittel, K. Uehara, C. Gmachl, and D. L. Sivco, “Carbonyl sulfide detection with a thermoelectrically cooled midinfrared quantum cascade laser”, Opt. Lett. 28, 2052-2054 (2003)

S.Y. Kung
Machine Learning for Bioinformatics 
C. L. Myers, M. J. Dunham, S.Y. Kung, O. G. Troyanskaya, "Accurate detection of aneuploidies in array CGH and gene expression microarray data," Bioinformatics,  vol. 20 , Issue 18, December 2004. Oxford University Press.

Ruby Lee
Resilient Computing and Communications Architectures modeled after biological organisms.

Margaret Martonosi
Wireless sensor networks for environmental and wildlife studies.
P. Zhang, C.M. Sadler, S.A. Lyon, and M. Martonosi, “Hardware design experiences in ZebraNet.” Proceedings of the 2nd international Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (Baltimore, MD, USA, November 03 - 05, 2004). ACM SenSys '04, pp 227-238.

Peter Ramadge
Signal processing for functional magnetic resonance imaging studies.
M. R. Sabuncu and P. J. Ramadge, “Gradient based optimization of an EMST image registration function,” IEEE ICASSP, Philadelphia, March, 2005.

James C. Sturm
Micro/nanofluidic structures for single-cell analysis and low-cost high throughput analysis systems
John A. Davis, David W. Inglis, Keith J. Morton, David A. Lawrence, Lotien R. Huang, Stephen Y. Chou, James C. Sturm, and Robert H. Austin, "Deterministic hydrodynamics: Taking blood apart," Proc. National Academy of Sciences, 103, 14779 – 14784 (2006).

Sigurd Wagner
Elastic microelectrode arrays for research on brain and spinal cord trauma.
Z. Yu, C. Tsay, S.P. Lacour, S. Wagner, B. Morrison, “Stretchable microelectrode arrays: a tool for discovering mechanisms of functional deficits underlying traumatic brain injury and interfacing neurons with neuroprosthetics,” 28th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 2006, pp. 6732-6735.

Ron Weiss
Synthetic biology: foundational technologies for genetically programming living cells and applications in stem cell research.
Basu, Gerchman, Collins, Arnold, and Weiss, “A synthetic multicellular system for programmed pattern formation,” Nature. 434, 1130-1134 (2005).