Yesterday BRL researcher Tamara Bonaci was 
awarded the UW’s Society for Women Engineers Outstanding Female Award for 2015! The award is given to an outstanding graduate student and undergraduate annually. Congratulations Tamara!
Announcements
UW highlights Sam Burden joining EE as an Assistant Professor this Fall
The University of Washington posted a great article discussing Sam Burden‘s return to UW EE as an Assistant Professor! Sam attended UW as an undergrad before pursuing his PhD at UC Berkeley, where he is currently a Post-Doc. This coming Fall, Sam will be joining the EE department and the BioRobotics Lab as an assistant professor.
Sam has this to say about joining the BRL:
“I am thrilled to be joining UW EE and the BRL, where I’ll study dynamic motion of robots, humans, and animals. I’m particularly eager to translate principles from biology to improve the design of robots, and to adapt engineered devices to assist humans. Between the BRL, the CSNE, and the broader Seattle health sciences community, I couldn’t have found a more ideal place to work.”
Check out the full article here
Bainbridge Highschool students tour the BRL
Bainbridge Highschool students from the school’s biomedical engineering club toured the BioRobotics Lab!
The students discussed brain-computer interface security with Tamara Bonaci, deep brain stimulation with Jeffrey Herron, haptic interfaces with Kevin Huang, and surgical robots with Danying Hu.
BioRobotics Lab attends annual Society for Neuroscience Meeting in Washington DC
This last week members of the BioRobotics Lab traveled to Washington DC to present ongoing work in the areas of BCI privacy and security, BCI optimization, and closed-loop DBS at the annual Society for Neuroscience (SFN) meeting (http://www.sfn.org/). In addition to attending the main SFN conference, BRL researchers attended and discussed their research at several satellite conferences including the IEEE EMBS Brain Grand Challenges Conference and the 2014 INS Annual Meeting.
BRL mentored summer students featured in CSNE YSP/REU Promotional Videos
This summer, the BRL hosted a number of summer students from either local high-schools or various undergraduate programs. Hannah Werbel, now a highschool senior, was interviewed about her experiences in the Young Scholars Program (YSP) by the CSNE:
Also interviewed were Joi Officer and Francisco Garcia who discussed their research experiences through the Research Experience for Undergrads (REU) Program. Check out their video here:
BioRobotics Lab demonstrates research technologies at the IEEE Seattle 110th Anniversary Celebration
This last Sunday evening, members of the UW BRL attended the IEEE Seattle Section’s 110th Anniversary Celebration event at the Seattle Pacific Center. Senator Maria Cantwell joined regional IEEE members to celebrate this impressive anniversary. Graduate student researchers Jeffrey Herron and Kevin Huang brought demos to the event to showcase ongoing research from the UW BioRobotics Lab.
BRL Graduate Alumni meet up in Bangkok
We were sent a photo from two BRL graduate alumni, Lee White and Thavida Maneewarn, who recently met up in Bangkok.
UW Center for Commercialization Spotlight on Applied Dexterity
Now it’s Applied Dexterity’s turn to have the University of Washington’s Center for Commercialization highlight their ongoing work! The UW C4C wrote an extensive article about the Raven open-source ecosystem and how it’s enabling new surgical robotics research. The full article is linked here
BRL hosts UW Math Academy Focus Group
The BioRobotics Lab ran a 3-day workshop for highschool Math Academy students. This workshop introduced haptic enabled systems and allowed the students to program and experiment with haptic devices.
BluHaptics profiled by the ASME Mechanical Engineering Magazine
James Pero wrote an excellent article about the BioRobotics Lab’s spinoff BluHaptics. The article appears in the ASME Mechanical Engineering Magazine, with an online version posted here