Professor Luke Theogarjan of UCSB ECE

The vision of electronics closely integrated with biology while popularized in science fiction is now becoming a reality. In this talk I will outline the role of electronics in biology in two areas neural interfacing and biosensing. Rapid advances in CMOS devices with the ever shrinking transistor dimension has enabled the packing of tremendous power in a small silicon area, however there has not been a concomitant rise in the devices currently used in therapeutic devices, I will examine some of the fundamental reasons as to why this is the case and ways of overcoming some of these barriers in the future. Along the same lines I will highlight some of the work we have done in biosensing and interfacing the micro, nano and the macroscale. I will also outline some of the fundamental challenges of remote powering of these devices and some of the clever techniques that have been explored. I will also highlight where I believe electronics will continue to play a revolutionary role in advancing human health.

Biography:

Luke Theogarajan is currently a Professor in the Electrical  & Computer Engineering at UC, Santa Barbara. Prof. Theogarajan received his Ph. D from M.I.T in 2007 and joined UCSB as a  faculty member in in 2008 after a brief post-doctoral appointment at M.I.T. Prof. Theogarajan’s research spans multiple areas spanning Electronics, Photonics, Material Science and Biology. His main focus is in combining these different fields to enable new devices and techniques for biological sensing and neural interfacing. Prof. Theogarajan also has a strong interest in interfacing electronics and photonics for energy efficient data transmission and ultra-stable clock synthesis. Before starting his PhD, he worked for 5 years on Intel's Pentium 4 design team. He has published in the fields of electrical engineering and polymer chemistry and holds 4 patents. Dr. Theogarajan has received a 2010 NIH New Innovator Award and a 2011 NSF Career Award. He was honored with the Northrop Grumman Excellence-in-teaching award in 2011 and was cited as an outstanding faculty member in EE for 2009, 2010,  2011, 2012, 2013,and 2017.

Address:Santa Barbara, United States