Wireless Bioelectronics

Speaker: Prof. Ada S Y Poon
Affiliation: Stanford University

Abstract:

Miniaturized electronics, when placed inside the body, can wirelessly monitor and modulate internal activity and thus hold promise as a new class of treatments for disorders. The development of such bioelectronic medicines requires wireless interfaces that are tiny and operate deep in a complex electromagnetic environment. In this talk, I will describe a new method for electromagnetic energy transfer that exploits near-field interactions with biological tissue to wirelessly power tiny devices anywhere in the body, including the heart and the brain. I will discuss engineering and experimental challenges to realizing such interfaces, including a pacemaker that is smaller than a grain of rice and a fully internalized neuromodulation platform. These devices can act as bioelectronic medicines, capable of precisely modulating local activity that may be more effective treatments than drugs, which act globally throughout the body.

Biography: 

Prof. Ada Poon received her B.Eng degree from the EEE Department at the University of Hong Kong and her Ph.D. degree from the EECS Department at the University of California at Berkeley. Upon graduation, she spent one year at Intel as a senior research scientist building reconfigurable baseband processors.  Afterwards, she joined SiBeam Inc. architecting Gigabit wireless transceivers.  After two years in industries, she returned to academic and joined the faculty of the ECE Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Since then, she has changed her research direction from wireless communications to integrated biomedical systems. In 2008, she joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.  She is a Terman Fellow at Stanford University. Prof. Poon has received the Okawa Foundation Research Grant in 2010 and NSF CAREER Award in 2013.  She is a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub investigator.

For more information, contact Prof. Ankur Mehta (mehtank@ucla.edu)

Date/Time:
Date(s) - Mar 19, 2018
12:30 pm - 1:30 pm

Location:
Mong Learning Center – EE-VI – #180
404 Westwood Plaza , Los Angeles California 90095