Howard M. Wilkoff Professorship of Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Courtesy Appointment, Mechanical Engineering

Maysam Chamanzar is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. His active areas of research are at the interface of photonics, bioMEMs, and neuroscience. Using basic principles of physics and advanced engineering techniques, Chamanzar’s group is designing and implementing novel devices and methods to address outstanding needs in biology and medicine. His main application areas of interest are neuroscience and biophotonics. His 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.

Chamanzar received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2012. He was with the EECS department at University of California Berkeley as a postdoc researcher and later as a research scientist before joining CMU. Chamanzar 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. He is the director of the Biophotonics and Neurotechnologies Lab and also the Shared Photonics Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University. Chamanzar is also a faculty member of the Carnegie Mellon Neuroscience Institute (CMNI) and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC).