Stanford Webinar - Wireless Bioelectronics: The Use of Tiny Devices to Treat Diseases

Traditionally, the main method of modulating biological activities has been chemical, i.e. drug therapies. While other methods exist, chemical methods have dominated how disease are treated. Join Dr. Ada Poon as she discusses the use of electrical and optical approaches, such as bioelectronics devices, to modulate biological and neural activities, including their benefits, challenges, and progress.

You will learn:

-The engineering and experimental challenges to realizing electromagnetic energy transfer devices that exploit near-field interactions with biological tissue to wirelessly power tiny devices.
-The benefits of optical and electrical methods of modulating biological activity to treat diseases.
-The history, development, and progress of miniaturized devices, and high resolution and mechanically flexible neural interfaces for both research and clinical systems.

About the Speaker:
Ada was born and raised in Hong Kong. She 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 in 2004. Her dissertation attempted to connect information theory with electromagnetic theory so as to better understand the fundamental limit of wireless channels.

Upon graduation, she spent one year at Intel as a senior research scientist building reconfigurable baseband processors for flexible radios. Afterwards, she joined her advisor’s startup company, SiBeam Inc., architecting Gigabit wireless transceivers leveraging 60 GHz CMOS and MIMO antenna systems. 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 moved back to California and joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. She is a Terman Fellow at Stanford University. She received the Okawa Foundation Research Grant in 2010 and NSF CAREER Award in 2013.