September 21, 2026
Working with Dr. Christoph Hofstetter’s lab on a research project involving ultrasound of the spinal cord. We would benefit from a BME master’s student with a background in electrical engineering or computer science. The work sits at the intersection of neurosurgery and biomedical engineering, and we’re looking for someone interested in signal processing, ultrasound, and medical applications for engineering.
Qualifications. We’re looking for an ECE master’s student with a computer science background and comfort with signal or image processing in MATLAB or Python. The project centers on spinal cord ultrasound, so it’s a good fit for anyone interested in ultrasound physics, beamforming, and engineering with clinical applications.
Project Description. The core need is someone who can work with imaging data and build processing pipelines, working hands-on with rat and human ultrasound data to develop the methods that turn those acquisitions into usable perfusion measurements. No wet-lab or medical experience is required, since we can teach those components. Based on interest, the student may also get exposure to the animal or clinical measurements, including rat surgeries and assisting with intraoperative recordings.
Timeline. We’d like someone who can start this autumn or winter quarter and stay through the academic year, which fits either a capstone or a research placement. The work scales to the student’s availability, so it accommodates a part-time commitment alongside coursework.
Benefits to the student. This is truly translational research at the interface of neurosurgery and engineering, with mentorship from Dr. Hofstetter, Matt Bruce at the Applied Physics Laboratory, and me. Our work together has appeared, or will soon appear, in journals such as Science Translational Medicine and Nature Biomedical Engineering. There’s a clear path to authorship on publications, co- or first depending on commitment, and to presenting at conferences, plus exposure to a clinical research environment that’s hard to get in coursework alone.
Contact Denis Routkevitch <droutkev@uw.edu>directly. Include CV and interests. No deadline to apply.