Faculty

Sam Burden

Sam Burden earned his BS with Honors in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2008. He earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California in Berkeley in 2014 and subsequently spent one year there as a Postdoctoral Scholar. In 2015, Sam returned to UW EE as an Assistant Professor. Sam is broadly interested in discovering and formalizing principles of sensorimotor control.  More at Sam’s EE Webpage

howardHoward Chizeck

Howard Jay Chizeck received his B.S and M.S. degrees from Case Western Reserve University, and the Sc.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982. Currently, he is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Washington. Professor Chizeck is a research thrust leader for the NSF Engineering Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering and also co-director of the UW BioRobotics Laboratory. His research interests are in telerobotics and neural engineering. His telerobotic research includes haptic navigation and control for robotic surgery and for underwater devices, as well as security of telerobotic systems.. His neural engineering work involves the design and security of brain-machine interfaces, and the development of assistive devices to restore hand and locomotion capabilities. More at Howard’s UW EE Webpage

Blake_headshot120xBlake Hannaford

Blake Hannaford received the B.S. degree in Engineering and Applied Science from Yale University in 1977, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1982 and 1985 respectively. At Berkeley he pursued thesis research in multiple target tracking in medical images and the control of time-optimal voluntary human movement. From 1986 to 1989 he worked on the remote control of robot manipulators in the Man-Machine Systems Group in the Automated Systems Section of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech. Since September 1989, he has been at the University of Washington in Seattle. He was awarded the National Science Foundation’s Presidential Young Investigator Award and the Early Career Achievement Award from the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. His currently active interests include haptic displays on the internet, surgical biomechanics, and biologically based design of robot manipulators.  More at Blake’s UW EE Webpage

Jeffrey Herron

Jeffrey Herron earned his Bachelor’s of Applied Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of British Columbia in 2009. After three years working in the Microsoft Research Hardware Prototyping Lab, he returned to graduate school to pursue a PhD in Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington within the BioRobotics Lab. Following the completion of his PhD thesis in 2016, Jeff moved to Minnesota to work within the Medtronic Restorative Therapies Research and Core Technology team. There he spent three years developing new human-use implantable research tools for improving the treatment of neurological disorders through the application of closed-loop system integration. In 2019, Jeff returned to UW as a research professor in the Department of Neurological Surgery, and rejoined the BRL to continue his research into developing new research tools and systems to explore the applications of bi-directional neural interfaces to enable or improve the treatment of neurological diseases, disorders, and injuries. More at Jeff’s personal UW page