Rahul Sarpeshkar is currently an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prof. Sarpeshkar received B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990 and the Ph.D. degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1997. His adviser at Caltech was Carver A. Mead. From 1997 to 1999, he was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs in its Department of Biological Computation within its Physics Division.
His current research group is known as the Analog Circuits and Biological Systems Group and is part of the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. His primary research interests are in the areas of
Professor Sarpeshkar's work on a hybrid analog-digital circuit that mimics feedback networks in the brain has appeared on the cover of Nature and has received wide media attention. His work on an analog bionic ear processor for the deaf has had wide impact and been featured in articles in the New York Times, Technology Review, and IEEE Spectrum as has his work on ultra-low-power brain-machine interfaces for the blind and paralyzed. He has authored more than 100 technical publications and is an inventor on more than twenty five patents. He is the inventor of the RF Cochlea, a rapid radio-frequency spectrum analyzer inspired by the human ear. His book Ultra Low Power Bioelectronics: Fundamentals, Biomedical Applications, and Bio-inspired Systems is published by Cambridge University Press. It was the top seller at the February 2010 ISSCC conference, where it was released. The book is a pioneering, insightful, and comprehensive textbook on ultra low power electronics, on bioelectronics, and on the synergy between the two fields. It is based on a highly rated course, 6.376, that Professor Sarpeshkar has taught at MIT since 2000. Professor Sarpeshkar has received the Junior Bose Award and Ruth and Joel Spira Award for excellence in teaching at MIT. Professor Sarpeshkar's book introduces a novel form of electronics termed Cytomorphic electronics, i.e, electronics inspired by cell biology, which is based on the deep connections between the stochastic Boltzmann equations of chemistry and the stochastic Boltzmann equations of electronics. Such electronics establishes an important bridge between the fields of circuits and chemistry and is useful for large-scale systems biology and synthetic biology. Professor Sarpeshkar has received several awards including the NSF Career Award, the ONR Young Investigator Award, the Packard Fellows Award and the Indus Technovator Award. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems and serves on the program committees of several technical conferences. His invited talk at the 2011 Frontiers of Engineering Conference, hosted by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) summarizes his unique and interdisciplinary bioengineering research.