There is something about watching a young engineer explain their work: the precision, the care, the way they light up when they get to the part that actually works. That never gets old for us. It is one of the reasons Madrona loves attending the University of Washington’s Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Research Showcase. Not just as observers or award-givers, but because we always learn from these brilliant students, researchers, and professors and share their passion for turning hard technical problems into practical solutions that really help people.
The UW community is a significant part of our own story, and the researchers we meet in these rooms consistently remind us why building things that matter is worth the difficulty.
The tenth annual UW ECE Research Showcase brought together students, faculty, and industry around some of the most demanding problems in computing, sensing, power systems, robotics, and human-machine interaction. Researchers presented work spanning next-generation radar, AI safety, wearable health and assistive technologies, drone autonomy and navigation, quantum computing, photonics, and next-generation wireless technologies.
What struck us most was the ambition. The research spanned a remarkable range of cutting-edge areas, all addressing real societal needs — from projects ready for near-term commercial impact to foundational work that will take years to mature but could be transformative at scale. Nearly every project was multidisciplinary by design, weaving together software, hardware, and domain expertise to solve problems that no single discipline could tackle alone. In a world where AI is making purely software-based products increasingly commoditized, this kind of work — where code meets the physical world — is exactly where we think the most durable companies will be built.
We celebrate the UW ECE program for their shared belief that technical excellence in service of a real problem is worth pouring yourself into. It’s also what we look for when we recognize the Best Innovation Toward Commercialization Award each year. The prize goes to research with a credible path from the lab into the world.
This year’s winner embodied that instinct clearly.
Winner: Portable Organ Dosimetry Device (PODD)
We are pleased to announce the Portable Organ Dosimetry Device (PODD) as this year’s winner. Developed by Pavan Sai Guntha and co-researchers Ethan Ingalls and William Hunter, and advised by Professor Scott Hauck and Professor Robert Miyaoka, PODD is a compact, wireless radiation monitoring system designed for one of the fastest-growing areas in cancer treatment: radiopharmaceutical therapy.
Here’s the problem PODD solves: Radiopharmaceutical therapies like Lutetium-177 (Lu-177) DOTATATE work by injecting a radioactive compound that seeks out and destroys tumor cells. After each treatment cycle, doctors need to know how the radiation spread through the patient’s body (how much reached the tumors, how much the kidneys absorbed, and how quickly it’s clearing) so they can determine the right next dose and when to give it. Today, the only way to get those answers is to bring the patient back to the hospital for multiple imaging scans on a SPECT/CT machine over several days. It’s expensive, time-consuming, and burdensome for patients who are already going through a lot. Many clinics skip thorough dosimetry entirely because of the hassle and cost, defaulting instead to a one-size-fits-all dosing approach that may under-treat some patients and over-expose others.
PODD changes this through several important innovations. The device is small enough to be built into a vest or wrap that a patient wears at home. A clinician tunes and positions the device’s 16 radiation detectors during an initial visit, orienting them to the right anatomical locations. The patient then takes it home and performs measurements on their own schedule, meaning there are no hospital trips required. Future versions will include sensors that alert the patient if the device isn’t positioned correctly, ensuring accurate readings without clinical supervision.
Part of what made this project stand out was Pavan himself. During his lightning talk and in conversation at his poster, he impressed our team with his technical depth, genuine curiosity, and ability to clearly articulate both the patient benefit and the commercial opportunity. His enthusiasm for the work was infectious — the kind of founder-like energy that gets us excited about where both Pavan and university research can go.
Pavan shared his motivation with us: “As an FPGA enthusiast, what drew me to this project was the chance to apply real-time signal processing to something as impactful as cancer treatment dosimetry. The most exciting part has been designing a flexible system that can be tuned for better patient-specific dosimetry, and seeing real-time energy histograms come together during radiation measurements was incredibly rewarding. I would love to see PODD move into clinical use in the coming months and ultimately help thousands of neuroendocrine tumor patients receive personalized, safer therapies from the comfort of their homes.”
The FPGA Breakthrough
The key technical innovation that makes PODD possible is an FPGA-based energy measurement system that uses a technique called time-over-threshold. Conventional gamma spectroscopy relies on high-speed analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). These components are expensive, power-hungry, and hard to shrink. That’s a non-starter for a portable, battery-powered device. The PODD team found a way around it: instead of digitizing each radiation pulse directly, the FPGA measures how long the pulse stays above a voltage threshold, which correlates with the energy of the incoming gamma ray. This eliminates the need for high-speed ADCs entirely, and the team demonstrated that the approach can accurately distinguish radiation signatures across a wide energy range. And does so with a device that costs roughly $500 in components, which stands in stark contrast to the current solution, which requires room-sized imaging equipment costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Why This Has Commercial Potential
At Madrona, when we evaluate the commercial potential of university research, we look for projects that address a clear and large market need with a technically differentiated solution. PODD checks every box.
Radiopharmaceutical therapy is one of the fastest-growing segments in oncology. Lu-177 based treatments are already FDA-approved for neuroendocrine tumors and prostate cancer, with new drugs and indications in the pipeline. As adoption accelerates, the dosimetry bottleneck will only grow more acute as there simply aren’t enough SPECT/CT scanners and trained technologists to provide personalized monitoring at scale. PODD is designed to fill that gap.
The value proposition is multi-sided. For patients, it means fewer hospital visits during an already difficult period and more personalized dosing that could improve outcomes. For hospitals, it means freeing up expensive imaging equipment while still delivering individualized care. For the broader healthcare system, it enables the shift from fixed-dose prescriptions to truly personalized dosimetry – a shift that clinical guidelines are increasingly calling for.
The project also demonstrates the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration that we increasingly see among the most high performing startups we meet. In the case of PODD, it spans FPGA design, analog electronics, nuclear medicine physics, and mobile software engineering. A solution made possible by the technical excellence of the adjacent disciplines reinforcing the others.
Looking Ahead
Choosing a single winner this year was hard in the best possible way. Closed-loop brain stimulation using hardware-accelerated machine learning. Zero-shot visual tracking with motion-aware memory. Novel tactile sensors fabricated for robotic applications. The students behind these projects have gone deep. Each is technically rigorous and clearly motivated, with a genuine sense of why their work could matter beyond the lab.
Every year we find ourselves most inspired by the combination of serious craft applied to problems worth solving. We’ve been lucky enough to watch this arc play out many times in the Pacific Northwest. A-Alpha Bio was co-founded by UW graduate researchers and is now a leader in AI-driven drug discovery. FusionFlight, last year’s ECE showcase winner, tackled GPS reliability for autonomous systems. The pipeline from this university into the world runs deep, and the people coming through it take their work seriously.
Congratulations to Pavan and the PODD team, to Professor Hauck, and to every researcher who shared their work this year. We leave this showcase every year with more optimism than when we arrived.
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