News

Thu, 09/14/2017 | UW Today

A new study finds that the U.S. made little progress from 2000 to 2010 in reducing relative disparities between people of color and whites in exposure to harmful air pollution. It found disparities in NO2 exposure were larger by race and ethnicity than by income, age or education, and that relative inequality persisted across the decade.

Wed, 09/13/2017 | UW News

In the long-range backscatter system developed by UW researchers, this sensor allows devices that run on extremely low power for the first time to communicate over long distances.

Wed, 09/06/2017 | UW Today

Researchers are developing a smartphone app that is capable of objectively detecting concussion and other traumatic brain injuries in the field, which could provide a new level of screening for athletes and accident victims. PupilScreen can detect changes in a pupil’s response to light, using a smartphone’s video camera and artificial intelligence, with accuracy almost as high as a pupilometer, an expensive and rarely used machine found only in hospitals.

Tue, 08/29/2017 | Civil & Environmental Engineering

A new bachelor's program in environmental engineering launches this fall. The program was added due to student interest in the field and increasing demand for environmental engineers.

Mon, 08/28/2017 | UW News

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.

Wed, 08/16/2017 | 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.

Wed, 08/16/2017 | 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.

Wed, 08/16/2017 | 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.

Thu, 08/10/2017 | UW Today

UW researchers have demonstrated for the first time that it is possible to remotely compromise a computer using information stored in DNA.

Wed, 07/26/2017 | 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.

Wed, 07/19/2017 | 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.

Mon, 07/17/2017 | 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.

Mon, 07/17/2017 | 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.

Tue, 07/11/2017 | 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.

Thu, 07/06/2017

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.

Wed, 07/05/2017 | UW Today

UW engineers have designed the first battery-free cellphone that can send and receive calls using only a few microwatts of power.

Tue, 06/27/2017 | 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.

Mon, 06/26/2017

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.

Mon, 06/26/2017 | 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.

Mon, 06/26/2017 | 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.

Thu, 06/08/2017 | 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.

Wed, 06/07/2017 | 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.

Fri, 06/02/2017 | UW Today

SeaGlass helps detect cell phone surveillance by modeling a city’s cellular landscape and identifying suspicious anomalies.

Tue, 05/30/2017 | 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.

Tue, 05/30/2017 | 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.