WAFER 2025

April 10, 2025

The UW Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (UW ECE) is excited to introduce the 3rd WomXn at the Forefront of Engineering Research (WAFER) event at the UW! This event aims to cultivate an inclusive environment for participants and speakers alike to share and learn more about research, hear others’ experiences in the field (at different stages of their careers), and to ultimately leave the event feeling inspired to potentially pursue a career in related fields. WAFER speakers include faculty, researchers, industry leaders, and students in ECE, CSE, and related fields.

WAFER encourages students who identify as women and/or non-binary to have an opportunity to showcase their research at the student poster session at the event. All students, faculty, researchers, and industry partners are welcome to attend this event.

WAFER Club Officers from left to right: Amber Chou, Jazlin Taylor, Vibha Kumar, Dilini Nissanka, Shakti Senthil, Shanti Garman (Not shown: Caitlin Widjaja)

Agenda

Welcome

Mari Ostendorf (System Design Methodologies Professor, UW ECE; Vice Provost for Research)

Keynote Speakers

12:10 – 12:35 p.m.

Ece Kamar (Managing Director of the AI Frontiers Lab, Microsoft Research)

Ece Kamar is the Managing Director of AI Frontiers, leading research and development towards pushing the frontiers of AI capabilities. AI Frontiers is a non-geographical, mission-focused lab inside Microsoft Research that explores innovations in foundation models and platform capabilities to push the frontier of AI capabilities, efficiency and control.

Ece’s personal research focuses on developing AI systems that can function reliably in the open world in collaboration with people. She has a decade of experience studying the impact of AI on society and developing AI systems that are reliable, unbiased and trustworthy. She has been instrumental in building the Responsible AI efforts inside Microsoft. She serves as Technical Adviser for Microsoft’s Internal Committee on AI, Engineering and Ethics. 

Ece is also an affiliate faculty at the University of Washington.

12:35 – 1 p.m.

Maya Gupta 

Talk title: It Takes A Network

Maya Gupta is a tech entrepreneur and AI researcher. She’s started seven companies, of which four have been profitable, and is working on a book on managing creativity. She led research teams at Google Research and the UW, and worked in R&D at Ricoh, Hewlett Packard, AT&T Labs, and NATO. Gupta has a PhD in EE from Stanford, and a BS EE and BA Econ from Rice.

Moderator

Maryam Fazel (Moorthy Family Inspiration Career Development Professor, UW ECE; CSE)

Maryam Fazel is the Moorthy Family Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington, with adjunct appointments in Computer Science and Engineering, Mathematics, and Statistics. Maryam received her MS and PhD from Stanford University, her BS from Sharif University of Technology in Iran, and was a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech before joining UW. She is a recipient of the NSF Career Award, UWEE Outstanding Teaching Award, a UAI conference Best Student Paper Award with her student. She directs the Institute for Foundations of Data Science (IFDS), a multi-site NSF TRIPODS Institute. She serves on the Editorial board of the MOS-SIAM Book Series on Optimization, and as an Acting Editor of the Journal of Machine Learning Research. Her current research interests are in the area of optimization in machine learning and control.

Faculty Talks

Jungwon Choi (Assistant Professor, UW ECE)

Jungwon Choi is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Washington. She received her Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University in 2019, M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2013, and B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Korea University in Seoul, Korea, in 2009. Her research interests include high-frequency power converters, wireless power transfer for battery-powered vehicles, industrial and biomedical applications, magnetic designs, controls at high-frequencies, energy storage, and wide bandgap devices. In 2017, she was selected to the Rising Stars in EECS, received Unlock Idea awards from Lam Research in 2019 and 2020, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award in 2021. She is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Industrial Electronics. Also, she is an Organizing Committee and Vice Chair of the IEEE Energy Conversion & Expo (ECCE) 2023, Technical Program Committee, and Organizing Committee of the IEEE Workshop on Control and Modeling for Power Electronics (COMPEL) 2023 and 2024, respectively.

Natasha Jaques (Assistant Professor, Allen School)

Natasha Jaques is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, and a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. Her research focuses on Social Reinforcement Learning in multi-agent and human-AI interactions. During her PhD at MIT, she developed foundational techniques for training language models with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). In the multi-agent space, she has developed techniques for improving coordination through social influence, and unsupervised environment design. Natasha’s work has received various awards, including Best Demo at NeurIPS, an honourable mention for Best Paper at ICML, and the Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award from the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing. Her work has been featured in Science Magazine, MIT Technology Review, Quartz, IEEE Spectrum, Boston Magazine, and on CBC radio, among others. Natasha earned her Masters degree from the University of British Columbia, undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Psychology from the University of Regina, and was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley.

Yiyue Luo (Assistant Professor, UW ECE)

Yiyue Luo received her Ph.D. degree in EECS from MIT in 2024 and a B.S. degree in Materials Science & Engineering from UIUC in 2017. Her research lies at the intersection of digital fabrication, human-computer/robot interaction, and applied AI. Her research on integrated intelligent textiles has been published in interdisciplinary journals, e.g., Nature Electronics and Nature Communications, top human-computer interactions, robotics and learning venues, e.g., CHI, UIST, CVPR, ICRA. Her work has been featured in prominent media outlets and invited to public museums and world congress exhibitions. She has been supported by fellowship from MathWorks, Google, and Accenture, and was listed as 30 under 30 North American 2024.

Amy Orsborn (Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor, UW ECE)

Amy Orsborn is a Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor in the departments of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Bioengineering at the University of Washington. Her research explores sensorimotor learningin brain-computer interfaces and how learning is influenced by the algorithms used. She completed her Ph.D. at the UC Berkeley/UCSF Joint Graduate Program in Bioengineering and her postdoctoral training at NYU’s Center for Neural Science. She recently received the NSF CAREER award, a Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, and was named an Emerging Leader by the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering. Her research has been supported by a range of federal (NSF, NIH) and private (Simons Foundation) agencies, along with industry (Google, Meta).

Moderator

Sam Burden (Associate Professor, UW ECE)

Sam Burden earned his BS with Honors in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2008. He earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California in Berkeley in 2014, where he subsequently spent one year as a Postdoctoral Scholar. In 2015, he returned to UW EE (now ECE) as an Assistant Professor, where he received awards for research (Young Investigator Program, Army Research Office, 2016; CAREER, National Science Foundation, M3X program, 2021) and service (Junior Faculty Award, UW College of Engineering, 2021). Sam served as his Department’s Associate Chair for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in 2021–2022 and 2024–2025 and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2022. He is broadly interested in discovering and formalizing principles of sensorimotor control. Specifically, he focuses on applications in robotics, neuroengineering, and (human-)cyber-physical systems. Sam lives with chronic illness, and is happy to meet with anyone who identifies as disabled or chronically ill.

Career Panel

Bryna Hazelton (eScience Director of Research Programs; Senior Research Scientist)

Bryna Hazelton is a Senior Research Scientist in the Physics Department and the eScience Institute. Bryna’s primary research is in astrophysics and cosmology — she helps design and build radio telescopes to detect signatures of the first stars and galaxies forming 13 billion years ago. She is an expert in the statistical analysis of peta-byte scale data from these telescopes, trying to detect an incredibly faint signal from the early universe in the face of very bright foreground galaxies and subtle instrumental systematics.

Bryna is the eScience Director of Research Programs and through eScience has collaborated on a diverse set of projects ranging from social work to ocean meta-genomics, helping with challenges ranging from collaborating efficiently with git to wrangling SQL databases to rigorous statistical analyses. Bryna loves learning about the challenges in new fields and helping researchers overcome hurdles in research computing.

Bryna has a B.S in Physics from UC San Diego and an MS and PhD in Physics from UC Santa Cruz, where she used satellite, airborne and ground-based instruments to study x-ray and gamma-ray emissions from thunderstorms. She switched to radio cosmology for her postdoc at UW and joined the eScience Institute in 2015. She is the lead developer and maintainer of several widely used astronomical and cosmological open source packages.

Kiana Ehsani (Co-founder, Vercept)

Kiana Ehsani is an entrepreneur and computer scientist specializing in computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. She earned her Ph.D. from the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where her research explored visual perception and interactive AI systems. Previously, Kiana served as a Senior Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), leading projects in embodied AI and multimodal learning. Her influential research has been published in leading AI conferences, earning multiple prestigious awards, including Best Paper awards at NeurIPS, CoRL, IROS and ICRA. Currently, Kiana is co-founder and CEO of Vercept, a stealth-mode startup focused on groundbreaking advancements in artificial intelligence.

Cassie Meeker (Sr. Applied Scientist, Amazon Robotics)

Cassie Meeker is a Sr. Applied Scientist at Amazon Robotics, specializing in computer vision. She currently develops computer vision models for unboxed item storage and manipulation. Previously at Amazon, Meeker worked on package manipulation, leading her team’s efforts to scale perception models from 5 sites to over 200 sites. Prior to Amazon, Meeker earned her doctoral degree from Columbia University in Mechanical Engineering, where she developed control algorithms for rehabilitation robotics and non-anthropomorphic teleoperation robotic hands.

Shirley Yeung (Sr. Engineering Manager, Stryker)

Senior engineering manager with extensive experience in embedded systems, GUI/application software, product/software-level design verification, test automation, and test system development for the Class III medical industry.  A leader with an excellent record of building high-performance and collaborative teams with focus on diversity and talent development.  Passionate about building a high-quality organization with an engaging cross-functional team culture.

Julia Busono (Platform Development Lead, Microsoft)

Julia Busono Platform Development Lead for Surface devices at Microsoft, working with EE and ME development partners to design and manufacture Laptops and Tablets showcasing Windows, for both Commercial and Consumer markets.  Prior experience was mostly in board designs – in medical devices (Spacelabs, Dolphin, OSI), wireless (AT&T Wireless), aerospace (Honeywell), and consumer electronics industries. A slight detour into Patent Law happened, followed by a return to the Electrical Engineering field.

Moderator

Shanti Garman (Ph.D. student and Professional Master’s Program instructor, UW ECE)

Shanti Garman is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Washington where she works with the Sensor Systems Lab (PI: Joshua R. Smith) on wireless power transfer for Lunar and planetary missions, RF energy harvesting from high-power sources on Earth, and emerging low-power communication schemes, such as Modulated Noise Communication. Shanti has a strong interest in applied electromagnetics and antennas, and previously taught the UW ECE Antennas course to UW Professional Master’s students. Before UW, Shanti completed her BSEE and MSEE at Stanford, launched satellites with Space Systems/Loral, earned an MBA, and continued launching services and programs for for-profit (Microsoft) and nonprofit (Rainier Scholars) institutions. As a first-generation college student and minority woman in STEM, Shanti has first-hand experience navigating institutional obstacles related to race and gender, and as such she dedicates time throughout the academic year to support departmental Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts.  At UW, this has included serving on the department’s DEI committee and co-chairing the first two WAFER conferences at UW.

Workshop

Fostering Cross-Cultural Communication, Professor Renee Desing

Renee Desing (Assistant Teaching Professor, UW ME)

Renee Desing is an assistant teaching professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington. Her research interests include diversity, equity, and inclusion in the engineering classrooms and workplaces. Dr. Desing graduated from The Ohio State University with her Ph.D. in Engineering Education, and also holds a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a M.S. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the Pennsylvania State University.

Networking participants

Vaishnavi Ranganathan (Principal Researcher in the Networking Research Group at Microsoft Research (MSR))

Leigh Huang (Senior Director, Microsoft Devices)

Claire Watts (co-founder and VP Operations at ThruWave)