UCLA Electrical Engineering

We are thrilled to announce that 6 UCLA Samueli PhD students have won the highly selective 2026 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship!

Among the fellowship recipients are our ECE students Sujoy Ghosh (advised by Professor Subu Iyer), Daniel McGovern (advised by Benjamin Williams), George Karfakis (advised by Professor Puneet Gupta), and Samyak Chakrabarty (advised by Professor Sudhakar Pamarti).

Congratulations to all our outstanding researchers!

Congratulations to Professor Sergio Carbajo on being named a recipient of the prestigious X-C Zhang Award.

The 2025 awardees were announced at the 13th International Symposium on Ultrafast Phenomena and THz Waves (ISUPTW 2026), held in Hangzhou, China.

Named in honor of pioneering THz scientist Xi-Cheng Zhang, the award recognizes exceptional researchers whose work has made outstanding contributions to the science, technology, and applications of terahertz waves. Carbajo’s recognition highlights the growing impact of his work at the intersection of ultrafast photonics, structured light, and advanced light–matter interactions.

Please see the LinkedIn post:

#science #technology #applications | The Quantum Light-Matter Cooperative Congratulations to Sergio Carbajo of UCLA and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory on being named a recipient of the prestigious X-C Zhang Award. 🏆 The 2025 awardees were announced at the 13th International Symposium on Ultrafast Phenomena and THz Waves (ISUPTW 2026), held in Hangzhou, China. Nam...

Technology from Professor Sam Emaminejad's lab was recently featured in a dedicated Research Highlights article in Nature Reviews Nephrology, a highly respected journal in the clinical field. The article focused specifically on their wearable biosensor and its potential for real-time assessment of kidney and liver drug clearance and dysfunction. This coverage underscores the interdisciplinary impact of the work emerging from Emaminejad's lab, as well as the department and school.

Please see the paper:

Wearable biosensor can detect impaired kidney drug clearance - Nature Reviews Nephrology Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the si...

Prof. Subramanian Iyer was recently featured in IEEE Spectrum article titled, "Are U.S. Engineering Ph.D. Programs Losing Students?" According to Iyer, departments across UC Los Angeles, including engineering, plan to scale back Ph.D. admissions this year. “The fear is that at some point, all this government money will be taken away,” Iyer says. “Lowering the admissions rate is just a way to prepare for that reality.”

Please see the full article:

U.S. Universities Brace for Shrinking Engineering Ph.D. Cohorts Some electrical engineering Ph.D. programs are seeing declining enrollment amid funding cuts and visa uncertainty.

The UCLA Integrated Sensors Laboratory, directed by Professor Aydin Babakhani, has been selected to participate in a major $8.1 million U.S. Space Force initiative led by Rice University under the Strategic Technology Institute 4 (SSTI-4) program.

As part of the Center for Advanced Space Sensing Technologies (CASST), a multi-institutional consortium, the UCLA team will lead the development of advanced millimeter-wave and terahertz (mm-wave/THz) sensing technologies aimed at next-generation space domain awareness.

The effort focuses on creating highly integrated, low-power sensing systems capable of operating in complex orbital environments, enabling improved detection, monitoring, and characterization of objects in space. Leveraging UCLA’s strengths in high-frequency integrated circuits, sensor miniaturization, and intelligent signal processing, the Integrated Sensors Laboratory will play a key role in translating cutting-edge research into deployable sensing platforms aligned with U.S. Space Force mission needs.

Professor Subramanian S. Iyer, Director of the UCLA CHIPS program, served as a panelist at the ISIG Executive Summit USA 2026 held April 20–21 in Santa Clara. He joined academic and industry leaders in a high-impact panel discussion on the evolving U.S. semiconductor landscape, focusing on the growing need to develop the next generation of engineering talent. The session highlighted critical challenges in higher education, workforce readiness, and the alignment of public and private investments to sustain innovation in advanced semiconductor technologies.

A research team lead by Professor Sam Emaminejad has now developed a microneedle sensor platform designed to address that problem through continuous, minimally invasive monitoring in skin. In a study published in Science Translational Medicine, the researchers showed in rats that the sensors could operate continuously for six days, track drug concentrations over time and provide insight into kidney and liver function by measuring how quickly the body cleared those drugs.

The advance could support a future in which doctors are better able to personalize dosing in real time and intervene earlier when organ function begins to decline. Beyond drug monitoring, the technology could also help bring continuous molecular monitoring to a wider range of conditions where changes over time carry important information about health and treatment response.

“We show that measurements taken just a millimeter beneath the skin can reveal clinically actionable information about organs deep inside the body,” said corresponding author Sam Emaminejad, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA or CNSI. “By continuously monitoring certain drugs and how the kidneys or liver process them, we can detect organ dysfunction earlier and guide treatment with greater precision.”

Please see the news release:

Skin-deep microneedle sensor tracks drug clearance and reveals early kidney and liver dysfunction A UCLA-led team has developed a tougher, higher-sensitivity wearable platform for continuous monitoring of important molecules.

Distinguished Professor Yahya Rahmat-Samii delivered an hour-long Raj and Jeanette Mittra Distinguished Lecture titled “From Darwin to Swarms to Brainstorms: Evolutionary Optimization for Modern Electromagnetic Engineering Design.” The talk was held at Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania, on Friday, April 10, 2026, and was sponsored by the Department of Electrical Engineering and the School of Engineering.

The Distinguished lecture highlighted the rapidly expanding role of advanced computational techniques in the optimal design of complex engineering systems, emphasizing the growing importance of Evolutionary Optimization (EO) methodologies over traditional brute-force approaches. It focused on nature-inspired algorithms, including Genetic Algorithms (GA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), and Brain Storm Optimization (BSO), explaining their underlying principles and recent advances. The presentation demonstrated the application of these techniques to a wide range of electromagnetic engineering problems: spanning space and planetary missions, medical and wireless devices, multifunctional and adaptive antennas, metamaterials, and nanostructures – while also assessing their practical advantages and limitations. In addition, it discussed the integration of machine learning and AI platforms to accelerate computational processes and further enhance optimization efficiency.

The Photonics Spectra Magazine recently reported an article highlighting Prof. Aydogan Ozcan’s research on label-free virtual tissue staining. Ozcan explained how transferring microscopy images into virtual tissue stains leads to the creation of digital twins in histology; these virtual stains can be produced by GPUs that accelerate image generation based on parallel analysis. Ozcan believes machine learning methods can sidestep human error and reagent contamination that may occur in laboratories performing traditional hematoxylin and eosin staining.

Please see the news release: https://www.photonics.com/Articles/Double-take-on-digital-twins/a72038

UCLA’s Ozcan Lab, in collaboration with Dr. Dino Di Carlo’s lab, published a new paper on an AI-powered portable biosensor for rapid and multiplexed cardiac biomarker testing. This work demonstrates that combining colorimetric and chemiluminescent biosensing within a single paper-based test, together with neural network-based signal analysis, enables accurate multiplexed detection of three key cardiac markers (cTnI, CK-MB, and NT-proBNP) across clinically relevant concentration ranges, improving point-of-care diagnostics.

Please see the news release: https://www.ee.ucla.edu/ai-powered-portable-sensor-enables-rapid-and-multiplexed-cardiac-biomarker-testing/