Announcements

Katherine was featured in an article by CSNE about her research!  She discusses her research in EMG-controlled virtual cursors, why she chose electrical engineering, and what inspires her in her work.  Read it here.

This week the BRL hosted Tony Dyson by giving him a lab tour! Tony Dyson, who built R2-D2, is in town for the We-Robot 2015 Conference on Robotics, Law & Policy. Tonight he will be interviewed by Ryan Calo as the conference’s keynote talk. He was also recently interviewed by Geekwire which can be read here-

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We’ve received great news for three BioRobotics lab affiliated students who each received a new fellowship this week! Two students, EE graduate student Katherine Pratt and undergrad alum Andrew Hill, each received a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Margaret Thompson, an EE graduate student, received the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. Congratulations to all three of them!

Current BRL graduate student Margaret Thompson graduated in 2014 from Harvey Mudd College with a degree in engineering. Her current work with Professor Chizeck in the BioRobotics Lab is designing novel brain-computer interface (BCI) platforms using long-term, fully implanted deep brain stimulation (DBS) electrodes which were originally designed to treat movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor. Read more about her work here.

Katherine Pratt graduated in 2008 from MIT with a degree in aerospace engineering.  She worked at Blue Origin in systems engineering prior to entering active duty as an officer in the US Air Force.  Most of her service was spent at Edwards AFB as a member of the operational test team for the F-35; she concentrated on pilot systems and cockpit integration.  After leaving the military, she worked with Adrian KC Lee at UW (LABS^N), running spatio-temporal behavioral, EEG, and M/EEG experiments.  For the past academic year she has been a participant in the NSF Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering’s program that facilitates veterans returning to academia.  Her current work with Professor Chizeck  is in the BioRobotics Lab is developing touchscreen control using EMG and other neural signals for individuals without sufficient finger dexterity to operate smart phones, tablets and similar devices.

Andrew Hill is a UW Bioengineering undergraduate alumni. He worked in the Biorobotics Lab from 2010 to 2012, where he did a year long senior capstone design project under the supervision of Professors Chizeck and Hannaford. After graduating in 2012, he then worked as an engineer at Tekscan, Inc. for one year followed by another year as a genomics researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital/Broad Institute in Boston, returning to UW in 2014 as a graduate student in Genome Sciences.

Read more about the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program here.

More information about the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship is available here.

BRL’s undergraduate Bioengineering senior, Sharon Newman, has been awarded the Fulbright U.S Student Award! For one year starting in September 2015, Sharon will be funded to conduct research and attend classes in the BrainLinks-BrainTools department at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Her proposed project “Sensory Exploration of Acutely Implanted TIME in the Rat Sciatic Nerve” will continue her aspirations to conduct neuro-prosthetic research, and increase access to assistive technologies. We congratulate her on her accomplishments, and are excited for her to embark on this fellowship!

The BioEngineering Department recently posted an article highlighting her achievements and plans for the immediate future available here.