Celebration Symposium for The Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Ideation and Prototyping Lab

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 directs the Stanford Wearable Electronics Initiate (eWEAR) and the Taiwan Science and Technology Hub @ Stanford. She is a CZ Biohub investigator since 2022 and an Arc Institute Innovation Investigator since 2023.

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 more than 700 refereed publications and over 80 US patents with a Google Scholar H-Index 206 and is one of the world’s most highly cited scholars in the fields of chemistry and material science. She is one of the Clarivate Citation Laureates in Chemistry for her pioneering work on skin-inspired electronics.

Bao is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors. She a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Science. She has been serving on the Board of Directors of the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation and scientific affair committee from 2022. She is an advisor for the Science for America, a solutions incubator to address urgent challenges, driven by an unprecedented alliance of leading philanthropic organizations.

Bao is a 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 2020, Wilhelm Exner Medal2018, ACS Award on Applied Polymer Science 2017, L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award 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. Research inventions from her group have been licensed and are foundational technologies of multiple start-ups founded by her students. Bao serves as an advisor for Fusion Venture and Boutique Venture.

In this talk, I will present our recent developments and applications of soft electronic sensors for neurochemicals, single neuron electrical recording and electrical stimulation.

Xiang Qian, MD, PhD, is a Pain Management Physician and Clinical Professor of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine at Stanford University. He is also the inaugural Stanford Medicine Endowed Director.

Dr. Qian is highly respected for his work on developing novel therapies for various chronic pain conditions, and he lectures internationally for those work and topics. Dr. Qian’s clinical interests include the treatment of acute and chronic pain, with special interest in migraine, headache, trigeminal neuralgia, glossopharyngeal neuralgia, hemifacial spasm, atypical facial pain, cancer pain, back pain, joint pain, nerve pain, and others. At Stanford, Dr. Qian developed many advanced surgical and interventional technologies for his patients, and he currently leads the CT-guided interventional pain program and is the recipient of Translational and Clinical Innovation Award at Stanford.

With his deep interest in clinical innovation and translational medicine, Dr. Qian is the faculty professor of Stanford Wearable Electronics Initiative (eWEAR) and has been working with colleagues from engineering school to develop mini implantable nerve stimulator, powered by wireless energy. Similar to a pacemaker for the heart, nerve stimulators are modulators for the nerves.

Due to his passion for global health and leadership experience, Dr. Qian was appointed as the Medical Director of Stanford International Medical Services (IMS) since 2016, where he has been working in collaboration with faculty members from all subspecialties and hospital administrations to help deliver care for international patients and promote international collaborations. His vision is to help Stanford become the leader in international medicine by providing its physicians and faculty the opportunities to expand their practice internationally and spread knowledge globally.

Dr. Qian completed his residency and fellowship training at Stanford. Prior to that, he received his PhD degree in Physiology and Biophysics from University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, and went through Postdoc fellowship training in Neuroscience at UCSF. Outside of the work he does at Stanford, Dr. Qian founded the Chinese American Physicians’ Society to foster his efforts in bringing medical knowledge internationally. Today, the society has more than 600 physician members from 50 states of the US, across over 38 different subspecialties.

In his free time, Dr. Qian enjoys reading, running, hiking and exploring the mountains and beaches of Northern California.

Chrissy and her husband created the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute in 2016 with a commitment to help advance brain science.

The organization’s vision is to improve the human experience by understanding how our brains perceive, learn, and interact with the world.

Chrissy was a co-founder of Shanda Interactive Entertainment Group in 1999, which has been credited with pioneering the online game and online literature industries in China. Now Shanda Group, the couple’s family office, Chrissy oversees company-wide operations. Prior to Shanda, Chrissy was an investment banker.

Chrissy has a Bachelor of Economics degree from the China Institute of Finance (now part of the University of International Business and Economics).

Michael Snyder is the Stanford W. Ascherman Professor of Genetics and the Director of the Center of Genomics and Personalized Medicine. He received his Ph.D. training at the California Institute of Technology and carried out postdoctoral training at Stanford University. Dr. Snyder has pioneered the use of “big data” and multiomics to advance scientific discovery and transform healthcare. His laboratory has invented many technologies that are widely used in medicine and research, including methods for characterizing genomes and their products (e.g. RNA-Seq, NGS paired end sequencing, ChIP-Chip and later Chip-Seq, protein arrays, machine learning for disease gene discovery). His application of omics and wearables technologies to perform longitudinal profiling of people when they are healthy and ill is transforming medicine and healthcare. Indeed, his laboratory’s recent work to use smartwatches and wearables to detect illness, including infectious disease such as COVID-19, prior to symptom onset is being used by many thousands of people.

Wearables enable tracking health in real time. We have demonstrated that smart watches can be used for detecting illness prior to symptom onset and continuous glucose monitoring can be used for identifying diabetes subtypes and managing glucose levels. Together these technologies can be used to transform healthcare through continuous health monitoring.

Oussama’s research in robotics focuses on novel control architectures, algorithms, sensing, and human-friendly designs for advanced capabilities in complex environments. With an emphasis on enabling robots to interact cooperatively and safely with humans and the physical world, these studies bring understanding of human movement for therapy, athletic training, and performance enhancement. This work on understanding human cognitive task representation and physical skills is enabling transfer for increased robot autonomy. With these core capabilities, we are exploring applications in healthcare and wellness, industry and service, farms and smart cities, and dangerous and unreachable settings – deep in oceans, mines, and space.

Coming Soon

Jaimie Henderson, M.D. is director of the Stanford program in Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery, and director of the Stanford Neural Prosthetics Translational Laboratory (NPTL). His research interests encompass several areas of stereotactic and functional neurosurgery, including frameless stereotactic approaches for therapy delivery to deep brain nuclei; mechanisms of action of deep brain stimulation; cortical physiology and its relationship to normal and pathological movement; neural prostheses; and the development of novel neuromodulatory techniques for the treatment of neurological diseases.

Intracortical brain-computer interfaces (iBCIs) have shown promise in restoring function to people with neurological diseases and injuries. Recent demonstrations include control of computer cursors and robotic limbs, as well as high-performance decoding of complex movements such as handwriting and speech. This lecture will discuss recent advances in iBCIs, focusing on restoration of communication and motor function for people with paralysis, as well as exploring their role in reshaping our understanding of the motor cortex. Contrary to the conventional homuncular model, recent findings suggest a nuanced organization within the precentral gyrus, with intermixed representations of upper and lower extremity movements as well as syllables, words and movement sequences. Discussion will focus on how scientific and engineering insights can help guide continued progress in understanding brain function and designing high performance assistive devices for restoration of neurological function.

Jennifer Widom is the Frederick Emmons Terman Dean of the School of Engineering and the Fletcher Jones Professor in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. She served as Computer Science Department Chair from 2009-2014 and School of Engineering Senior Associate Dean from 2014-2016. Jennifer received her Bachelor’s degree from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in 1982 and her Computer Science Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1987. She was a Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center before joining the Stanford faculty in 1993. Her research interests span many aspects of nontraditional data management. She is an ACM Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences; she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000, the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award in 2007, the ACM-W Athena Lecturer Award in 2015, and the EPFL-WISH Foundation Erna Hamburger Prize in 2018. 

The Spakowitz lab is engaged in projects that address fundamental chemical and physical phenomena underlying a range of biological processes and soft-material applications. Current research in our lab focuses on four main research themes: chromosomal organization and dynamics, protein self-assembly, polymer membranes, and charge transport in conducting polymers. These broad research areas offer complementary perspectives on chemical and physical processes, and we leverage this complementarity throughout our research. Our approach draws from a diverse range of theoretical and computational methods, including analytical theory of semiflexible polymers, polymer field theory, continuum elastic mechanics, Brownian dynamics simulation, equilibrium and dynamic Monte Carlo simulations, and analytical theory and numerical simulations of reaction-diffusion phenomena. A common thread in our work is the need to capture phenomena over many length and time scales, and our flexibility in research methodologies provides us with the critical tools to address these complex multidisciplinary problems.

Professor Horowitz initially focused on designing high-performance digital systems by combining work in computer-aided design tools, circuit design, and system architecture. During this time, he built a number of early RISC microprocessors, and contributed to the design of early distributed shared memory multiprocessors. In 1990, Dr. Horowitz took leave from Stanford to help start Rambus Inc., a company designing high-bandwidth memory interface technology. After returning in 1991, his research group pioneered many innovations in high-speed link design, and many of today’s high speed link designs are designed by his former students or colleagues from Rambus.

In the 2000s he started a long collaboration with Prof. Levoy on computational photography, which included work that led to the Lytro camera, whose photographs could be refocused after they were captured.. Dr. Horowitz’s current research interests are quite broad and span using EE and CS analysis methods to problems in neuro and molecular biology to creating new agile design methodologies for analog and digital VLSI circuits. He remains interested in learning new things, and building interdisciplinary teams.