Jump to navigation

The University of Arizona Wordmark Line Logo White
College of Engineering
Home
  • Home
  • Give Today
  • Contact Us

Search form

  • About
    • Welcome
    • Advisory Board
    • Contact Us
  • Undergrad Programs
    • Admissions
    • Degrees
    • Courses
    • Advising
    • Scholarships & Financial Aid
    • Research & Internships
    • Student Clubs & Organizations
    • ABET Accreditation
  • Grad Programs
    • Admissions
    • On-Campus Degrees
    • Online Degrees
    • Courses
    • Advising
    • Research Focus Areas
    • Funding
  • Research
    • Focus Areas
    • Centers
    • Inventions
  • Faculty & Staff
    • Faculty Directory
    • Staff Directory
    • Faculty Videos
    • Employee Resources
    • Open Positions
  • Alumni
    • Give Today
  • News & Events
    • ECE News Archive
    • Events
Home / Research

Research

Meeting the Challenge

From Better Healthcare to Safer Computing

Globally recognized ECE faculty are finding solutions to some of the world’s biggest challenges – software for securing and managing big data in healthcare, imaging and blood tests to detect and diagnose disease, prostheses to save eyesight and robotic surgical tools, cyber DNA software to stop hackers in their tracks and devices that cloak wireless transmissions, for example.

The University of Arizona is one of the country’s top public research institutions. Set in Tucson, a tech and bioscience hotspot, the UA’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering provides exceptional interdisciplinary research for students – students who say they don’t just take part in research, they drive it.

With entrepreneurial ventures that boost Arizona’s leadership in technology and top national and international companies and institutions for partners, ECE researchers are moving life-changing products out of the lab and into the marketplace with unprecedented speed.

Focus Areas

ECE – with annual external research expenditures exceeding $5 million – houses multidisciplinary research centers and labs that support internationally recognized research in the following primary areas:

  • Autonomous Systems and Robotics Communications
  • Biomedical Technologies
  • Circuits, Microelectronics and Very-Large Scale Integration
  • Communications, Coding and Information Theory
  • Computer Architecture and Cloud/Distributed Computing
  • Optics, Photonics and Terahertz Devices and Systems
  • Signal, Image and Video Processing
  • Software Engineering and Embedded Systems
  • Wireless Networking, Security and Systems

Project Highlights

Community Development

ECE professor Kelly Simmons-Potter is co-leading a project to develop greenhouse and water purification systems in Indigenous communities

The proposed project will provide water access, food sovereignty, and energy independence to our Native American community partner.

Improving Automotive Radar Systems

Professor Hao Xin is lead inventor for a pair of technologies that could improve performance and lower the cost of automotive radar systems – making key safety features available to more people.

These technologies have applications in sensing and detection, autonomous cars and drones, pollution, water vapor detection, as well as wireless communication.

Equality in STEM

ECE professor Liesl Folks is the principal investigator on a new project that is helping women in STEM address discrimination.

What we wanted to do was come up with a program that will help students, graduate women in the STEM disciplines, to both analyze the situations that they're facing, and see it as a career dilemma, and then strategize around "'How do I get past this."

Keeping Computer Data Meaningful

Startup Codelucida, cofounded by Professor Bane Vasić, is commercializing its error-correction technology for data storage and communications.

The error-correction codes that we as engineers build in communications or memory chips are a kind of grammar that computers use to understand data and keep it meaningful.

Research Centers

UA Electrical and Computer Engineering values collaboration across disciplines, units and institutions. ECE faculty direct the following collaborative research centers:

  • Arizona Research Institute for Solar Energy
  • Broadband Wireless Access Center
  • Center for Quantum Networks
  • Center to Stream Healthcare In Place
  • Cloud and Autonomic Computing Center

Featured Videos

C2SHIP & Wearable Technology

Janet Roveda and Kathie Melde

UA Goes Quantum – Qubit by Qubit

Bane Vasić and Zheshen Zhang

Digital Health & Wearable Devices

Janet Roveda and Hao Xin

Fast Facts
$ 7 million
annual research expenditures (2022)
66
patents issued (2012-2021)
Top 20
U.S. public research institution (National Science Foundation and Times Higher Education)
6
IEEE fellows
14
operational startup companies
5
research centers
Contact Us
Contact Us
Loading...
  • Cadence University Program Member
  • Employee Resources
The University of Arizona
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
1230 E. Speedway Blvd.
P.O. Box 210104
Tucson, AZ 85721-0104
520.621.6193

Facebook YouTube LinkedIn


University Privacy Statement

© 2023 The Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of The University of Arizona.