In the Media

Along with 9 other finalists, EECS graduate student Cody Gilleland presented his dream research proposal in April to Regeneron. He was named inaugural recipient, based on his presentation to essentially bring Moore's law to early stage drug delivery by designing a new system for developing and validating drug targets (prior to mouse model trials).

Muriel Médard, professor of electrical engineering in the MIT EECS Department and principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) and EECS graduate student Falvio du Pin Calmon have teamed with researchers at the National University of Ireland to demonstrate that the security of many keyless-entry systems may not be as secure as previously thought. Médard and the NUI team will present their work at the Asilomar Conference on Signals and Systems in September.

James Fujimoto, the Elihu Thomson Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT has been selected for the 2014 IEEE Photonics Award. The award, which is sponsored by the IEEE Photonics Society, is given in recognition of outstanding achievements in photonics. Prof. Fujimoto is cited “for pioneering the development and commercialization of optical coherence tomography for medical diagnostics.”

Srini Devadas and Jacob White have been selected for their significant contributions to the Design Automation Conference (DAC), which celebrated its 50th anniversary June 2 -6. Both were recognized for their impact on the course of DAC’s history.

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty members and principal investigators in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) Tim Lu and Rahul Sarpeshkar have designed cells that exploit natural integral biochemical functions to make analog circuits to perform calculations and potentially act as pathogen sensors. The researchers, including lead author MIT postdoc Ramiz Daniel and microbiology graduate student Jacob Rubens have published their work in the May 15 online edition of Nature Biotechnology.

A new mechanism that could help explain the remarkable sensitivity and exquisite frequency selectivity of our sense of hearing has been discovered by Dennis Freeman, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) Principal Investigator in the Micromechanics Group, in collaboration with Dr. Roozbeh Ghaffari, post-doctoral associate in the RLE.

Collin Stultz, faculty member of both the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology and MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science has lead a recent study of one of the proteins associated with neurological diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. Using computational modeling, Stultz has proposed solutions to a controversy over the structure of alpha synuclein that could lead to development of new more effective treatments. Read more...

Building an effective Photovoltaic cell (PV) that both collects enough solar energy and carries the charge efficiently has held back the use of quantum dots despite their relative ease of production. Read more.

Researchers at the High Throughput Neurotechnology Group in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) have built an automated system that can rapidly produce 3-D, micron-resolution images of thousands of zebrafish larvae and precisely analyze their physical traits. The system, described in the Feb. 12 edition of Nature Communications, offers a comprehensive view of how potential drugs affect vertebrates, says Professor Mehmet Fatih Yanik, senior author of the paper.

Trying to build a new circuit that would use an emerging technology called compressed sensing has taken on a renewed focus under the work of members of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at MIT including EECS graduate student Omid Abari. With researchers in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT (RLE) and in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) Obari is seeking to balance theory with chip building realities using new evaluation algorithms to allow creation of the ideal circuit.

EECS researchers including professors Vladimir Bulovic, Jing Kong and Mildred Dresselhaus and postdoctoral associate Hyesung Park and graduate student Joel Jean have joined MIT colleagues including associate professor of materials science and engineering Silvija Gradecak and postdoctoral associate Sehoon Chang, to produce a new kind of flexible and solar cell based on graphene paired with nanowires and quantum dots. This work could rival the current use of silicon crystals or indium tin oxide (ITO) and is predicted to be scalable for alternative use to the silicon or ITO models.

Gregory Wornell, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) has teamed with former RLE member Dr. Maryam Shanechi, who has recently earned her doctorate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, Prof. Emery Brown of the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at MIT, and neurosurgeon Dr. Ziv Williams at Massachusetts General Hospital to develop the first instance of an "intelligent" Brain-Motor Interface, which uses specially designed advanced neural decoding algorithms to decode in advance a sequence of planned movements from neural activity in the premotor cortex.