Scientist Profile – Professor Rabia Tugce Yazicigil
Tiny, energy-efficient biosensors can solve huge challenges
Rabia Tugce Yazicigil, Ph.D. – Assistant Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering
The WISE-Circuits Laboratory, led by Professor Rabia Tugce Yazicigil, specializes in living bioelectronic sensors and energy-efficient wireless systems for healthcare, environmental monitoring, and sustainable manufacturing.
Professor Yazicigil discussed her lab’s work developing health-monitoring, ultra-low-power bioelectronic sensors that can eventually harvest energy from their environment. She also shared her love for Motown music and reflected on where she would go if she could time-travel.
How would you describe your research and the goals of your lab?
We develop energy-efficient microchips that are custom-designed to tackle challenges related to human health, sustainability, and the environment. Let’s say you have a gastrointestinal problem such as Crohn’s disease, and you want to put a device in the gut to measure what’s happening in real time. To achieve the level of detail that’s needed to solve these types of problems, we need devices that do not yet exist. My group’s vision is to make such devices a reality by teaming up with domain experts to understand the application requirements, and then designing the interface at the fidelity needed to solve those problems.
Can you share one example of such a research project?
My group is establishing a field we call “Cyber-Secure Biological Systems.” You can think of these as living bioelectronic sensors. They combine genetically engineered living organisms with secure, low-power custom-designed microchips to sense, respond, and report on biological environments.
Leveraging biology to sense biology is powerful because these organisms have excellent specificity and sensitivity in harsh environments, such as those found in the human gut or in wastewater. Electronics, on the other hand, are very good at complex computations and communications. Combining the two allows us to address many societal challenges. In healthcare, this technology can be used for disease diagnosis, biomarker discovery, and closed-loop therapeutic delivery. In environmental monitoring, it can measure water or soil quality. It can also play an important role in sustainable manufacturing.
A key challenge to developing such technology is adhering to power and size constraints, for instance, when creating a monitoring device that will be placed in the human gut. Such a device must be very small, so you can’t rely on large batteries. Ideally, we aim to remove the battery entirely by designing systems that can operate using very little power and can also harvest that energy from their environment within the gastrointestinal tract.
Can you describe your research methodology?
We go all the way from theory to architecture development and end-to-end system demonstration. First, we experimentally validate the chips’ electrical performance in the lab, ensuring they consume the right amount of power, detect signals with high sensitivity, and function as designed. Then we interface them with engineered biological systems to test their real-world behavior.
For example, to evaluate our health-monitoring, living, bioelectronic sensor chip, we conducted animal testing in pigs. For wastewater monitoring, we collaborate with wastewater facilities for real-world deployment. In sustainable manufacturing, we are working with a biotech startup, Capra Biosciences, to test our custom chips within a lab-scale bioreactor model—designed to support cell growth for biomanufacturing—before scaling it up for industrial use.
Did you always know you wanted to be an electrical engineer?
My grandmother was a big influence on my path. She was a stay-at-home mom in Konya, Turkey, where women rarely worked back then, but she was ambitious and determined. She raised five daughters who all became doctors, engineers, or other successful professionals. She even learned to drive and got her license at 65, showing her determination to keep growing and adapting!
I always knew I wanted to be an engineer. At Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey, I explored different fields, such as materials science, but analog integrated circuit design felt intuitive to me. I think what I love most about chip design is that you can develop something from scratch and hold the final working product in your hands. That’s a uniquely rewarding feeling.
What’s your favorite thing about working at Boston University?
The people aspect of my job is the most rewarding part. I love collaborating with experts on interdisciplinary projects and learning from different fields. My group doesn’t just focus on biological applications—we also work on wireless communication, information theory, signal processing, and security. Solving complex problems requires expertise from multiple areas. I also find working with students very rewarding. The impact we have as educators multiplies when students go out into the field and make a positive difference in society. BU fosters this kind of collaboration, especially as disciplines continue to merge and drive innovation.
What is your most desired superpower?
That’s a hard one. If I could pick two, one would be telepathy. I’d like to know what people are thinking. The other would be time travel. I’m a big fan of Motown classics—The Supremes, The Temptations, Sam Cooke. I’d love to live in those times and hear that music live. I also love older movies and actors like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Robin Williams. I’d love to be able to see movies like Heat or Awakenings when they first came out in theaters.
Is there anything else you’d like the BU community to know about you?
I’ve recently become passionate about making women’s health tracking more accessible worldwide, particularly as it pertains to fertility and IVF, based on my own experiences. For instance, I began an exciting collaboration with Dr. Uroš Kuzmanović, the CEO & Founder of BioSens8, a BU spinout, as their scientific advisor. Together, we are working to push the boundaries of real-time bio-electronic sensor technology initially by developing a novel progesterone hormone biosensor. This continuous health monitoring device is designed to help women track their fertility health easily and accurately from the comfort of their own home. It’s an important step forward in making reproductive care more personalized, accessible, and empowering for women everywhere.
Interview conducted and edited by Tanvi Agrawal (CAS ’27) and Jim Cooney