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 U of A'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 $7.6 million – houses multidisciplinary research centers and labs that support internationally recognized research in the following primary areas:
- Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
- 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
- Quantum Information Science and Engineering
- Signal, Image and Video Processing
- Software Engineering and Embedded Systems
- Wireless Networking, Security and Systems
Project Highlight
A Positive Patient Process
ECE and neurosurgery professor Allan Hamilton is part of a team developing an artificial intelligence bot to train medical students to communicate with patients effectively and compassionately.
"This represents a step big forward in our medical education, utilizing the power of artificial intelligence to coach and evaluate medical students in a way that was previously unimaginable."
Research Centers
U of A 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
- Wireless Innovation towards Secure, Pervasive, Efficient, and Resilient Next G Networks
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
Top 20
U.S. public research institution
(National Science Foundation
and Time Higher Education)
$7.6 million
annual research expenditures (2024)
7
research centers
10
NSF CAREER awardees
10
IEEE fellows
14
operational startup companies