eWEAR Symposium 2022

Zhenan Bao is K.K. Lee Professor of Chemical Engineering, and by courtesy, a Professor of Chemistry and a Professor of Material Science and Engineering at Stanford University. Bao founded the Stanford Wearable Electronics Initiate (eWEAR) in 2016 and serves as the faculty director.

Prior to joining Stanford in 2004, she was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies from 1995-2004. She received her Ph.D in Chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1995. She has over 700 refereed publications and over 100 US patents with a Google Scholar H-Index >190.

Bao is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation and is a member of its scientific affair committee.

Bao was the inaugural recipient of the VinFuture Prize Female Innovator 2022, the ACS Chemistry of Materials Award 2022, MRS Mid-Career Award in 2021, AICHE Alpha Chi Sigma Award 2021, ACS Central Science Disruptor and Innovator Prize in 2020, Gibbs Medal by the Chicago session of ACS in 2020, Wilhelm Exner Medal by Austrian Federal Minister of Science 2018, ACS Award on Applied Polymer Science 2017, L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award in the Physical Sciences 2017.

Bao is a co-founder and on the Board of Directors for C3 Nano and PyrAmes, both are silicon-valley venture funded start-ups. She serves as an advising Partner for Fusion Venture Capital.

Skin is the body’s largest organ. It is responsible for the transduction of a vast amount of information. This conformable, stretchable, self-healable and biodegradable material simultaneously collects signals from external stimuli that translate into information such as pressure, pain, and temperature. Over the past decade, we have developed materials design concepts to add skin-like functions to organic electronic materials without compromising their electronic properties. These new materials and new devices enabled development of skin-like sensors for a broad range of applications in medical devices, robotics and wearable electronics. In this talk, I will discuss our recent sensor developments to allow mapping bioelectrical signals and neurotransmitters in addition to physiological signals.

Ian H. Gotlib is the Marjorie Mhoon Fair Professor and Director of the Stanford Neurodevelopment, Affect, and Psychopathology (SNAP) Laboratory at Stanford University. From 2005-2010, Dr. Gotlib served as Senior Associate Dean for the Social Sciences, and he served as Chair of the Psychology Department at Stanford from 2012-2018.

In his research, Dr. Gotlib examines psychobiological factors that place individuals at increased risk for developing depression and engaging in suicidal behaviors, as well as processes that are protective in this context. More specifically, Dr. Gotlib examines neural, cognitive, social, endocrinological, and genetic factors in depressed individuals and applies findings from these investigations to the study of predictors of depression in children at risk for this disorder. In related projects, Dr. Gotlib is also examining the differential effects of early life stress on the trajectories of neurodevelopment in boys and girls through puberty in an effort to explain the increased prevalence of depression and suicidal behaviors in girls in adolescence. Finally, Dr. Gotlib is extending this work to the study of brain function and structure, endocrine function, and behaviors in neonates and infants being raised in suboptimal environments.

Dr. Gotlib’s research is supported largely by grants from the National Institutes of Health. He has also been funded by the National Health Research Development Program and the Medical Research Council of Canada, and leads an interdisciplinary team funded by PHIND. Dr. Gotlib has received the Distinguished Investigator Award from the National Alliance for Research in Schizophrenia and Affective Disorders, the Joseph Zubin Award for lifetime research contributions to the understanding of psychopathology, the APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution, the APS Distinguished Scientist Award, and a MERIT award from NIMH. He has published over 500 scientific articles and has written or edited several books in the areas of depression and stress, including the Handbook of Depression with Constance Hammen, now in its 3rd edition. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the American Psychopathological Association, and is Past President of the Society for Research in Psychopathology.

The transition through adolescence is difficult for many individuals and is characterized by high rates of depression. In fact, adolescent-onset depression is associated with longer and more severe episodes that are often refractory to treatment, and with functional impairment that places adolescents at risk for longstanding difficulties. Over the past 8 years we have recruited and characterized a sample of over 200 boys and girls, starting at ages 9-13 years, with respect to their exposure to early life stress, their stress reactivity, immune function, rate of biological aging, sleep quality, and patterns of brain structure, function, and connectivity. We have re-assessed these boys and girls every two years and have begun to elucidate factors that contribute to the development of depression in adolescence. Importantly, our study was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, that has caused significant stress and disruption for adolescents and has likely led to alterations in their mental health and neurodevelopment. In fact, it is not clear whether adolescents who lived through the pandemic are comparable psychobiologically to their peers assessed before the pandemic. In this talk I will describe findings of our study characterizing associations among early life stress, neurodevelopment, and mental health in adolescents, and will describe how youth assessed during the pandemic differ from youth assessed before the COVID-19 shutdowns.

Dr. Soh received his B.S. with a double major in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science with Distinction from Cornell University and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. From 1999 to 2003, Dr. Soh served as the technical manager of MEMS Device Research Group at Bell Laboratories and Agere Systems. He was a faculty member at UCSB before joining Stanford in 2015. His current research interests are in analytical biotechnology, especially in high-throughput screening, directed evolution, and integrated biosensors.

A biosensor capable of continuously measuring specific molecules in vivo would provide a valuable window into patients’ health status and their response to therapeutics. Unfortunately, continuous, real-time molecular measurement is currently limited to a handful of analytes (i.e. glucose and oxygen) and these sensors cannot be generalized to measure other analytes. In this talk, we will present a biosensor technology that can be generalized to measure a wide range of biomolecules in living subjects. To achieve this, we develop molecular switches that change its structure upon binding to its target analyte and produce an electrochemical current or emit light. Our real-time biosensor requires no exogenous reagents and can be readily reconfigured to measure different target analytes by exchanging the molecular switches in a modular manner. Using our real-time biosensor, we demonstrate the first closed loop feedback control of drug concentration in live animals and discuss potential applications of this technology. Finally, we will discuss methods for generating the molecular switches which are at the heart of this biosensor technology.

Dr. Zeitzer is an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the co-director of the Stanford Center for Sleep and Circadian Science. He is also a health science specialist at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System. He has researched the interactions of sleep and circadian rhythms for more than 25 years.

Coming Soon

Karl Deisseroth is the D.H. Chen Professor of Bioengineering and of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard, his PhD from Stanford, and his MD from Stanford. He also completed postdoctoral training, medical internship, and adult psychiatry residency at Stanford, and he is board-certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. He continues as a practicing psychiatrist at Stanford with specialization in affective disorders and autism-spectrum disease, employing medications along with neural stimulation.

Over the last sixteen years, his laboratory created and developed optogenetics, hydrogel-tissue chemistry (beginning with CLARITY), and a broad range of enabling methods. He also has employed his technologies to discover the neural cell types and connections that cause adaptive and maladaptive behaviors, and has disseminated the technologies to thousands of laboratories around the world.

Among other honors, Deisseroth was the sole recipient for optogenetics of the 2010 Koetser Prize, the 2010 Nakasone Prize, the 2011 Alden Spencer Prize, the 2013 Richard Lounsbery Prize, the 2014 Dickson Prize in Science, the 2015 Keio Prize, the 2015 Lurie Prize, the 2015 Albany Prize, the 2015 Dickson Prize in Medicine, the 2017 Redelsheimer Prize, the 2017 Fresenius Prize, the 2017 NOMIS Distinguished Scientist Award, the 2018 Eisenberg Prize, the 2018 Kyoto Prize, and the 2020 Heineken Prize in Medicine from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. For his discoveries, Deisseroth has also received the Perl Prize (2012), the BRAIN prize (2013), the Pasarow Prize (2013), the Breakthrough Prize (2015) the BBVA Award (2016), the Massry Prize (2016) and the Harvey Prize from the Technion/Israel (2017). He was selected a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 2013, and was elected to the US National Academy of Medicine in 2010, to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2012, and to the US National Academy of Engineering in 2019.

Ken Goodson is the Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs in the School of Engineering. As Mechanical Engineering Chair & Vice Chair (2008-2019), he led two strategic plans and recruited 15 faculty who transformed the department’s scholarship and diversity.

Goodson specializes in heat transfer and electronics cooling. His lab pioneered phonon free path measurements, helped IC firms launch SOI and PCRAM, and has a long track record of translating breakthrough cooling science to companies. He’s a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow with ASME, IEEE, APS, AAAS, and the National Academy of Inventors. He received the ASME Kraus Medal, the inaugural IEEE Richard Chu Award, the AIChE Kern Award, the SRC Aristotle Award, and the Heat Transfer Memorial Award. His PhD alums include dozens at IC firms and 20+ Professors at MIT, UC Berkeley, and other schools. Goodson has 35 patents and co-founded Cooligy, which built heat sinks for Apple and was acquired by Emerson.

Goodson moonlights as a baritone oratorio soloist with appearances at Davies Symphony Hall and Bing Concert Hall. His wife, Laura Dahl, is a concert pianist with the Stanford music faculty.

Coming Soon

Jonathan “JB” Berent is the CEO and Founder of NextSense, Inc, a spinoff of X, Google’s Moonshot Factory.   He combines broad executive business experiences at elite Silicon Valley tech companies with a passion for driving novel scientific exploration in states of consciousness.  Prior to a career pivot in 2016 focused on building novel biosensing wearables, JB was responsible for driving revenue at Oracle at their inside sales division, Oracle Direct, earning the distinction of Director of the Year based on his team having the highest performance across the 2000 person Org in 2008.  After Oracle, JB led sales & partnerships, Birst, a SF based start-up focused on business intelligence reporting to the CEO.  JB joined Google in 2011 to lead their West Coast sales and partnerships efforts for the newly formed Google Offers, a direct competitor to GroupOn.  JB managed teams of 110+ people with responsibility of $50M+ at public companies.  

In 2016, JB followed his passion and left Sales and Partnerships to focus on a life-long belief that unlocking the mind is the key to both health and maximizing human potential.  He built a team at X to develop brain sensing technologies. What started as a 20 percent project in 2017 grew into X’s largest funded early-pipeline project by 2020. At NextSense, he completed 3 IP transactions, 3 commercial contracts with Pharma, and two academic partnerships in the first 12 months.   Along with a number prominent sleep and dream researchers, he published the groundbreaking study revealing a mechanism to study an altered state of consciousness accessible during sleep.  Berent has spoken at various conferences such as Chan Zuckerberg BioHub, Stanford Medicine Big Data Health, and the California Sleep Society where he discussed the latest scientific findings for an unusual state of dreaming characterized by increased frontal lobe activity despite being in a classic REM state.  He is a regular guest lecturer at Stanford’s popular Dement’s Sleep and Dream course.  Berent gave the inaugural First Annual Dr. Ahmed Ghouri Medical AI Memorial Lecture in 2021 at UCSF. JB was invited to speak to the National Academies of Science Standing Committee of Biotechnology Capabilities and National Security Needs in Jan 2022 on the topic, “Discussing the Impending Impact of Pervasive Brain – Monitoring Technology.”  JB was featured in long-read cover story in Wired magazine in the June 2022 print edition  He was also named “One to Watch” by Robb Report in June 2022.  JB received his BA with Honors in Philosophy & Religious Studies from Stanford University. 

Much of the focus for BCI has been around addressing extremely important pathological conditions where the promise of thought-computing brings much needed accessibility to computing platforms generally.  However, this framework should be expanded by including the concepts of digital twins and applying this to neural signatures collected over-time and at scale with millions of users.  With AI applied to such data, we can eagerly anticipate a future where the brain is a platform, and the ear is the USB port for reading/writing to this platform.  In this talk, CEO and Founder of NextSense, will discuss how NextSense is enabling this future right now and the insights it has gained in its clinical studies in epilepsy and sleep, and how this will evolve over time. 

Dr. Spitler is the Deputy Director of the Precision Health and Integrated Diagnostics Center at Stanford University. He completed his Post Doctorial Research Fellowship (SCIT) at Stanford University School of Medicine, conducting research in the developing field of Magnetogenetics for remote controlled cellular reprogramming and developed smart MRI cell tracking tools for oncology cell tracking studies. He has designed numerous biological models, synthetic biology approaches and worked on the development of new technologies in a number of scientific areas ranging from medical devices to gene therapy. Prior to his position at Stanford, Dr. Spitler received his Ph.D. in Cellular and Developmental Biology at the Beckman Laser Institute at the University of California, Irvine. His research at the Beckman Laser Institute included developing and characterizing new nitric oxide-based drugs, laser, and LED-based multimodal wound healing therapies some of which are currently being used in the clinic as a result of his work.

Dr. Spitler received his Bachelor’s of Science degree in Molecular Cell and Developmental Biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he worked in the area of structural biology. Over the past two decades he has held a number of academic and industrial positions and has served as an advisor or advisory board member for a number of Bay Area companies. Dr. Spitler is the recipient of the Stanford Cancer Imaging Fellowship Training Award, RSL Innovation Challenge Award, the Biophotas Research Fellowship, and the Stanford Center for Biomedical Imaging Achievement Award. 

Jennifer Hicks is Deputy Director of the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance at Stanford, with a focus on collaborative research projects and programs to advance our understanding of the biological principles underlying human performance. Dr. Hicks also serves as the Director of Research for the Mobilize Center, an NIH Biomedical Technology Resource Center at Stanford University and the Restore Center, an NIH-funded center that brings state-of-the-art engineering tools to rehabilitation scientists. Her research is focused on interfacing biomechanical modeling with statistical and machine learning methods to predict the effects of surgery and other interventions on human movement. She is also using data from mobile phones and other novel sources to understand physical activity and performance. Dr. Hicks helps run the multi-faceted training and outreach programs of the Human Performance Alliance, the Mobilize Center and the Restore Center. In addition, as the Research and Development Manager for the OpenSim software project, she guides the project’s development team and serves as the voice of the software user/researcher.

Ellen Kuhl is the Walter B. Reinhold Professor in the School of Engineering and Robert Bosch Chair of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. She is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and, by courtesy, Bioengineering. She received her PhD from the University of Stuttgart in 2000 and her Habilitation from the University of Kaiserslautern in 2004. Her area of expertise is Living Matter Physics, the design of theoretical and computational models to simulate and predict the behavior of living systems. Ellen has published more than 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and edited two books; she is an active reviewer for more than 50 journals at the interface of engineering and medicine and an editorial board member of seven international journals in her field. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she published a textbook on Computational Epidemiology and Data-Driven Modeling of COVID-19. Ellen is a founding member of the Living Heart Project, a translational research initiative to revolutionize cardiovascular science through realistic simulation with 400 participants from research, industry, and medicine from 24 countries. Ellen is the current Chair of the US National Committee on Biomechanics and a Member-Elect of the World Council of Biomechanics. She is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and of the American Institute for Mechanical and Biological Engineering. She received the National Science Foundation Career Award in 2010, was selected as Midwest Mechanics Seminar Speaker in 2014, and received the Humboldt Research Award in 2016 and the ASME Ted Belytschko Applied Mechanics Award in 2021. Ellen is a three-time All American triathlete, a multiple Boston, Chicago, and New York marathon runner, and a two-time Kona Ironman World Championship qualifier.

Steven M. Levine, PhD is the Sr. director of virtual human modeling at Dassault Systèmes. Dr. Levine has more than 30 years of experience in the development of computational tools that translate cutting-edge science into product innovations. He currently leads Virtual Human Modeling at Dassault Systèmes and is the Founder and Executive Director of the Living Heart Project. He is responsible for a Life Science incubator of startup healthcare companies within the 3D EXPERIENCE Labs, building a marketplace of digital healthcare services, and serves on several company boards. Dr. Levine was elected into the College of Fellows in the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and holds a PhD in Materials Science from Rutgers University. He began is career in health tech at the San Diego based startup Biosym that went public as Accelrys in 2004 and acquired by Dassault Systèmes in 2014.

Dave is a biostatistician with expertise in prognostic models, clinical trials, observational studies, and diagnostic devices. Dave joined Unlearn as Head of Biostatistics before becoming Chief Science Officer, overseeing clinical, regulatory, and biostatistics. Prior to Unlearn, Dave was the first Head of Biostatistics & Epidemiology for Verily Life Sciences. Other past roles include Lead Program Biostatistician at Genomic Health and Sr Dir of Medical Affairs Statistical Analysis at ICON Clinical Research. Dave received his bachelors and masters in Statistics from Carnegie Mellon. He has co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed papers in medical journals.