Carnegie Mellon University

Maysam Chamanzar

Maysam Chamanzar

Dr. William D. and Nancy W. Strecker Career Development Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering

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  • 331 Roberts Engineering Hall
  • 412-268-3390
Address 5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Bio

Dr. Chamanzar received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2012. His dissertation on developing novel hybrid plasmonicphotonic on-chip biochemical sensors received the Sigma Xi best Ph.D. thesis award. He is currently the Dr. William D. and Nancy W. Strecker Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He was postdoc researcher at UC Berkeley before joining CMU. His current research is on developing novel electro-acousto-optic neural interfaces for large-scale high-resolution electrophysiology and distributed optogenetic stimulation. Maysam has published more than 25 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers and he holds three pending patents. He is the recipient of a number of awards including the SPIE research excellence award and GTRIC innovation award, and became the finalist for the OSA Emil Wolf best paper award and Edison innovation award.

 

 

Education

Ph.D., 2012 
Electrical and Computer Engineering 
Georgia Institute of Technology

M.S., 2008 
Electrical and Computer Engineering 
Georgia Institute of Technology

M.S., 2005 
Electrical Engineering 
Sharif University of Technology

B.S., 2003 
Electrical Engineering 
Amirkabir University of Technology

Research

The active areas of research are at the interface of Photonics, BioMEMs, and Neuroscience. Using basic principles of physics and advanced engineering techniques, Prof. Chamanzar’s group is designing and implementing novel devices and methods to address outstanding needs in biology and medicine. The main application areas of interest are Neuroscience and Biophotonics. Research on Neuroengineering includes developing next generation multimodal (Acousto-opto-electrical) neural interfaces to understand the neural basis of brain function and realize functional brain-machine interfaces. The Biophotonics front is focused on developing efficient hybrid photonic-plasmonic-fluidic on-chip systems for point of care diagnostics, environmental monitoring, imaging, and spectroscopy. The scope of research encompasses theoretical design and simulation, fabrication and packaging, experimental benchtop characterization, as well as in-vivo, in-vitro, and ex-vivo tests on biological systems.

Keywords

  • Opto-acousto-electrical neural interfaces
  • Optogenetics
  • Integrated biophotonics
  • Plasmonics
  • Sensing and spectroscopy
  • Acousto-optics

Relataed news

Thursday, February 15, 2024

Developing Bio-Inspired Medical Instruments

Advanced Optronics and Carnegie Mellon University awarded an NSF grant to develop medical instruments that sense their own shape changes during complex surgeries to provide real-time tactile feedback to surgeons.
Wednesday, September 27, 2023

Steering Light at the Speed of Sound

CMU researchers develop ultrafast light steering technology that could benefit LiDAR, projectors, and imaging systems.
Thursday, July 20, 2023

Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Unprecedented Resolution

Researchers begin human testing of noninvasive neural interfaces that can be used as a wearable device.
Tuesday, January 12, 2021

A Universal Port for the Brain

Maysam Chamanzar of Carnegie Mellon University and Azadeh Yazdan of the University of Washington have received a National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 grant to create a dural smart port that will allow direct access to the brain using optical and electrical stimulation, as well as recording.
Monday, October 05, 2020

Parylene Photonics Enable Future Optical Biointerfaces

Maysam Chamanzar’s team has developed a new class of materials for optical biointerfaces.
Monday, July 20, 2020

Neural Recording

A team led by Maysam Chamanzar is developing a novel neural interface made from stainless steel for much safer, high-density neural recording.
Tuesday, July 07, 2020

Chamanzar Featured in Wevolver

Work by Maysam Chamanzar and his team on developing a novel neural interface made from stainless steel for much safer, high-density neural recording was featured in Wevolver.
Monday, November 04, 2019

Inventive design illuminates neurons deep in the brain

New paper features a range of research from engineering design to nanofabrication and neurobiology experiments on live neurons.
Wednesday, July 17, 2019

Breakthrough in ultrasound could replace endoscopy

One day, scopes may no longer need to be inserted into the body, such as down the throat or under the skin, to reach the stomach, brain, or any other organs for examination.
Thursday, June 13, 2019

Singularity Hub features ECE/BME joint DARPA project

Singularity Hub featured BME and ECE researchers’ project recently funded by DARPA.
Tuesday, May 21, 2019

Wearable system to sense and stimulate the brain

A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon is starting a project to design and implement a high-resolution, noninvasive neural interface that can be used as a wearable device.
Thursday, April 18, 2019

Sound steers light through the brain

Maysam Chamanzar and his colleagues have introduced a groundbreaking technique to the field of optics that can revolutionize optical imaging and manipulation in biology, machine vision, and spatial light modulation. The results are published in two recent papers in the journals of Optics Express and Nature Communications.
Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Suppressing epileptic seizures via Anderson localization

Chamanzar, together with UC Berkeley’s Reza Alam, introduce a non-invasive approach to mitigate seizures in a paper recently published in the Journal of Royal Society Interface.
Monday, May 09, 2016

BrainHUB announces recipients of ProSEED funding

Carnegie Mellon University has funded four new interdisciplinary neuroscience projects through its ProSEED grant program. The projects aim to create new tools and techniques to vastly improve how scientists study the brain and leverage the university’s strengths in biology, computer science, machine learning, psychology and engineering.
Monday, January 11, 2016

Meet the new ECE faculty members

As a new semester begins, we welcome three new faculty members to ECE. Meet Brandon Lucia, Swarun Kumar, and Maysam Chamanzar.