Faculty

Joshua R. Smith is the Milton and Delia Zeutschel Professor, jointly appointed in the Allen School of Computer Science, and in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington, where he leads the UW+Amazon Science Hub and the Sensor Systems Laboratory. His research focuses on inventing new sensor systems, devising new ways to power and communicate with them, and developing algorithms for using them. The research has applications in the domains of ubiquitous computing, robotics, medical devices and HCI. He is a co-founder with colleagues and former students of Jeeva Wireless, Wibotic, and Proprio. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.

Smith was formerly a Principal Engineer at Intel Research Seattle, where he led projects in robotics, wireless power and wireless sensing. At Intel, he founded the Wireless Resonant Energy Link (WERL) project, which demonstrated wireless transfer of tens of watts of power. He also began the Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform (WISP) project, which is a battery-free platform for sensing and computation. He completed his M.S. in 1995 and his Ph.D. in 1999 at the MIT Media Lab under Neil Gershenfeld. He earned his M.A. and B.A. with Honors in Physics and Theoretical Physics from the University of Cambridge and his B.A. in Computer Science and Philosophy from Williams College.