Watson Lecture Preview: Azita Emami

Microscale implantable and wearable devices will one day transform the field of medicine. They enable continuous monitoring and closed-loop therapeutic systems that could help millions of patients suffering from chronic diseases such as diabetes and epilepsy. Current solutions are bulky, inefficient, hard to track, and do not last very long inside the body. During her April 3 Watson Lecture, Caltech's Azita Emami will discuss how to solve these problems and build microchips that can continuously and wirelessly monitor key biomarkers such as glucose. She will also present efficient personalized devices for future brain-machine interfaces.

Emami is the Andrew and Peggy Cherng Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering. She is also a Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator and the executive officer for the Electrical Engineering Department. Emami's research focuses on the design and development of high-performance, reliable, and low-power solutions in highly scaled technologies. The applications for her work cover everything from high-speed data communication to energy-efficient sensors, optoelectronics, and biomedical devices. She received her bachelor's degree from Sharif University of Technology in 1996, and her master's degree (1999) and PhD (2004) from Stanford University. She started at Caltech as an assistant professor in 2007 and became a professor in 2013. She was named an HMRI Investigator in 2015 and Cherng Professor in 2017. She was also the deputy chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science from 2015 to 2018.

The lecture—which will be held at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, April 3, in Beckman Auditorium—is a free event; no tickets or reservations are required.

Named for the late Caltech professor Earnest C. Watson, who founded the series in 1922, the Watson Lectures present Caltech and JPL researchers describing their work to the public. Many past Watson Lectures are available online at Caltech's YouTube site.