BiliScreen is a new smartphone app that can screen for pancreatic cancer by having users snap a selfie and detecting signs of jaundice in a person’s eye.
News
August 16, 2017 | College of Engineering
HCDE major Tsewone Melaku is aligning her interests in engineering with her passion to make STEM education accessible to underrepresented high school students.
August 16, 2017 | UW Today
MIT Technology Review has named computer science & engineering assistant professor Franziska Roesner one of 35 “Innovators Under 35” for 2017. Roesner’s research focuses on privacy and security in emerging technologies, and she is co-director of the department’s Security and Privacy Laboratory.
August 16, 2017 | UW Today
Researchers in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering have demonstrated how it is possible to transform a smart device into a surveillance tool that can collect information about the body position and movements of the user, as well as other people in the device’s immediate vicinity. Their approach involves remotely hijacking smart devices to play music embedded with repeating pulses that track a person’s position, body movements, and activities both in the vicinity of the device as well as through walls.
August 10, 2017 | UW Today
UW researchers have demonstrated for the first time that it is possible to remotely compromise a computer using information stored in DNA.
July 26, 2017 | Department of Mechanical Engineering
UW researchers are developing devices to answer some of the trickiest questions about marine energy’s environmental effects. Working as part of the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center, researchers have developed a detection system that captures important data about interactions between marine life and marine energy converters — but only when marine life is present. This detection system drastically reduces the extreme amount of low-value data that researchers would otherwise need to store and inspect.
July 19, 2017 | College of Engineering
Imagine revolutionizing the renewable energy market with the silica gel packets you find in shoeboxes and snack bags. The research team behind Membrion is working to do just that. Developed by chemical engineering researchers Greg Newbloom (PhD ’14) and Weyerhaeuser Endowed Associate Professor Lilo Pozzo, the Membrion technology seeks to innovate battery storage with a lower cost, improved battery membrane that uses silica gel. And, the team says, they couldn’t be doing it without the support of partners on and off campus committed to advancing alternative energy research, innovation and commercialization.
July 17, 2017 | UW Today
UW scientists have discovered a simple way to raise the accuracy of diagnostic tests for medicine and common assays for laboratory research. By adding polydopamine — a material that was first isolated from shellfish — to these tests at a key step, the team could increase the sensitivity of these common bioassays by as many as 100 to 1,000 times.
July 17, 2017 | UW Today
Peter Pauzauskie, an assistant professor in MSE, leads a research team that has developed a fast, inexpensive method to make electrodes for supercapacitors, with applications in electric cars, wireless telecommunications and high-powered lasers. The team published a paper in the journal Nature Microsystems and Nanoengineering describing their supercapacitor electrode and their novel production method that starts with carbon-rich materials dried into a low-density matrix, or aerogel. This aerogel on its own can act as a crude electrode, but Pauzauskie’s team more than doubled its capacitance.
July 11, 2017 | UW Today
University of Washington researchers have developed new algorithms that solve a thorny challenge in the field of computer vision: turning audio clips into a realistic, lip-synced video of the person speaking those words.
July 6, 2017
UW CEE welcomes Laura Lowes, the William M. and Marilyn M. Conner Professor, as the new department chair. Lowes starts her new position in September.
July 5, 2017 | UW Today
UW engineers have designed the first battery-free cellphone that can send and receive calls using only a few microwatts of power.
June 27, 2017 | UW Today
Essential tremor, a movement disorder characterized by involuntary shaking during intentional movement, can be treated by implanting an electrode in the brain for deep brain stimulation (DBS). In the current method for DBS, the implanted electrode is constantly “on” even when a patient doesn’t need it, which wastes battery life. UW researchers at the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering have developed a closed-loop system for DBS that is on only when the patient needs it. This system saves battery life and lengthens the amount of time a patient can go between surgical procedures to replace the battery.
June 26, 2017 | UW Today
A versatile light-sheet microscope, developed by a UW team including ME associate professor Jonathan Liu, can provide surgeons with real-time pathology data to guide cancer-removal surgeries and can also non-destructively examine tumor biopsies in 3-D. The microscope provides surgeons with proof that they have removed all cancerous tissue, preventing the need for further surgeries to remove cancerous cells that were missed during the initial procedure.
June 26, 2017 | Department of Mechanical Engineering
The Engineering Innovation in Health (EIH) program partners engineering students and faculty with clinicians to develop affordable solutions to pressing health needs.
June 26, 2017
Jihui Yang, the Kyocera Professor in MSE, will take on the position of Chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, starting September 1, 2017. Jihui has provided leadership in the department as chair of the undergraduate committee, and brings experience in both academia and industry that will position the department to grow and excel in the coming years.
June 8, 2017 | UW Today
WideOpen is a new open-source tool to help advance open science by automatically detecting datasets that are overdue for publication. Its use on the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) led to the dramatic drop of overdue datasets, with 400 datasets released within the first week.
June 7, 2017 | UW Today
A team led by Xiaodong Xu, a UW professor in MSE and a member of the UW's Clean Energy Institute, and researchers at MIT has for the first time discovered magnetism in the 2-D world of monolayers, or materials that are formed by a single atomic layer. The findings, published June 8 in the journal Nature, demonstrate that magnetic properties can exist even in the 2-D realm — opening a world of potential applications. Magnetic materials form the basis of technologies that include sensing and hard-disk data storage. Researchers are always seeking new magnetic materials that are more compact, more efficient and can be controlled using precise, reliable methods.
June 2, 2017 | UW Today
SeaGlass helps detect cell phone surveillance by modeling a city’s cellular landscape and identifying suspicious anomalies.
May 30, 2017 | College of Engineering
We congratulate 3 students from the STARS program's first cohort who completed the program — and their engineering degrees — in four years instead of the expected 5.
May 30, 2017 | UW Today
A new study finds that drone deliveries emit less climate-warming carbon dioxide pollution than truck deliveries in some — but not all — scenarios.
May 26, 2017 | Foster School of Business
UW Engineering teams took 1st, 3rd and 4th place as well as a number of other awards in this year’s Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship Business Plan Competition! Congratulations to Membrion (ChemE) in 1st place, LC-Tourniquet (ME) in 3rd place and Epi4All (ME) in 4th place!
May 25, 2017 | UW Today
A team of UW synthetic biology researchers have demonstrated a new method for digital information processing in living cells, analogous to the logic gates used in electric circuits.
May 19, 2017
Undergraduates Celina Gunnarsson (BioE) and Alexis Harroun (A&A) received the 2017 Dean's Medal for Academic Excellence for a combination of their grades, academic rigor, research experience, extracurricular activities, and leadership. Celina helped develop a three-dimensional model of the blood-brain barrier to study cerebral malaria while Alexis has conducted experiments on thermal protection systems and hypervelocity launching technologies.
May 15, 2017 | Department of Mechanical Engineering
EcoCAR students are converting a Camaro into a hybrid-electric car. The Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) program supports long-term, experiential projects like EcoCAR that present real-world learning opportunities.
Shwetak Patel
Steve Brunton
Mari Ostendorf
Matthew O’Donnell
Yinhai Wang
Brett Maurer
Eve Riskin
Yin Tat Lee
Ruikang Wang