Rate My Professor Michel Maharbiz

Michel M. Maharbiz is a Professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 1997 and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley in 2003, under the advisement of Professor Roger T. Howe and Professor Jay D. Keasling. His doctoral research on microbioreactor systems contributed to the establishment of Microreactor Technologies, Inc., which was acquired by Pall Corporation in 2009. Prior to his faculty appointment at Berkeley, Maharbiz co-founded Tweedle Technologies and served as Vice President of Product Development at Quswami, Inc., from July 2010 to June 2011. He holds the position of Co-Director at the Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Center and is affiliated with the Center for Neural Engineering & Prostheses. Maharbiz is also listed as an Adjunct Professor in the Electrical Engineering division.

Maharbiz's research focuses on the extreme miniaturization of technology to build synthetic interfaces to cells and organisms, spanning biosystems and computational biology, as well as micro/nano electromechanical systems. He is a co-inventor of neural dust, an ultrasonic interface enabling wireless recording from the peripheral nervous system, as described in the 2016 Neuron paper Wireless recording in the peripheral nervous system with ultrasonic neural dust. His group pioneered the world's first remotely radio-controlled cyborg beetles, selected as one of MIT Technology Review's TR10 top emerging technologies of 2009 and Time Magazine's Top 50 Inventions of 2009. Additional key publications include A minimally invasive 64-channel wireless uECOG implant (IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, 2015), Modular synthetic inverters from zinc finger proteins and small RNAs (PLoS ONE, 2016), and A miniaturized 64-channel 225 μW wireless electrocorticographic neural sensor (ISSCC, 2014). His innovations encompass oxygen-sensing implants for deep tissue, flexible bioelectronics, and neural interfaces for brain-machine applications. Maharbiz has received the McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award (2017), NSF CAREER Award (2009), Bakar Fellow (2014), Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator (2017), GE Scholar, Intel IMAP Fellow, and 2013 Excellence in Engineering Education Award from National Instruments. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society and a member of the Society for Neuroscience. His work has advanced bioMEMS, neuroengineering, and tissue engineering fields.