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Research

Meeting the Challenge

From Better Healthcare to Safer Computing

Globally recognized ECSE 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 School of Electrical, Computing, and Software 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, ECSE researchers are moving life-changing products out of the lab and into the marketplace with unprecedented speed.

Focus Areas

ECSE – with annual external research expenditures exceeding $10 million – houses multidisciplinary research centers and labs that support internationally recognized research in the following primary areas:

  • Artificial intelligence and machine learning
  • Autonomous systems, communications and robotics
  • Biomedical technologies
  • Circuits, microelectronics and very-large scale integration
  • Computer architecture and cloud/distributed computing
  • Cybersecurity
  • Optics, photonics and terahertz systems
  • Quantum information science and engineering
  • Signal, image and video processing
  • Software engineering
  • Wireless networking and communications

 

Project Highlights

New ways of thinking

ECSE assistant professor Xiaodong Yan is designing advanced computer chips, taking inspiration from the brain's synapses. These are then improved further by using sound waves to enable chips to operate faster and more energy-efficiently.

"This could make future neuromorphic hardware more compact, more parallel, and more efficient for tasks that require combining many features, such as pattern recognition, sensory processing and data analysis."

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Protecting patients

ECSE associate professor Danella Zhao is developing a machine learning platform for hospitals to secure patient data. Once uploaded, cloud-based models run directly on the encrypted data without ever accessing private information. Only the hospital can decrypt the results.

"A big part of my work is figuring out how to make this process faster and more practical for real-world healthcare use."

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Cleaner computing

Bane Vasić, the Kenneth Von Behren Professor in the School of Electrical, Computing, and Software Engineering, develops quantum low-density parity check (QLDPC) algorithms to detect and correct errors in quantum computing.

"We aim to develop a system that uses these QLDPC codes. And our team at the University of Arizona has unique expertise to bring them to reality and enable large-scale quantum computing."

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Research Centers

U of A School of Electrical, Computing, and Software Engineering values collaboration across disciplines, units and institutions. ECSE 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

 

University of Arizona Nano Fabrication Center
Located in the ECE Building, this cleanroom features a $35.5M renovation.

 

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)

$10.2M

annual research expenditures (2025)

7

research centers

10

NSF CAREER awardees

15

IEEE fellows

10

operational startup companies