We’re pleased to welcome Blake Hannaford as the new Technical Director for GIX. In this new role, Hannaford will be teaching and co-leading development of the MSTI curriculum, focusing on continuous improvement and the addition of new tracks over time. He is also leading the GIX Launch Studio course.
“I’m so excited to help build GIX,” Hannaford said. “I can’t wait to work with the global mix of GIX students. They are future world-changers!”
Before his own graduate study, Hannaford held engineering positions in hardware and software design, office automation, and medical image processing. He received his PH.D in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC-Berkeley, where his research focused on multiple target tracking in medical images and the control of fast human movement.
After graduation, he worked on the remote control of robot manipulators at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, at Caltech. Since 1989, he has been at the University of Washington in Seattle where he founded the BioRobotics Lab.
Hannaford’s current interests include haptic displays on the internet, surgical robotics and biomechanics, and the introduction of Artificial Intelligence into surgical technologies. In 2013, Hannaford co-founded a company called Applied Dexterity. In 2014-2015 he worked at Google-X and its spinoff Verily. He’s a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Presidential Young Investigator Award and he is currently an IEEE Fellow, which is a distinction reserved for select members in IEEE – a professional organization for the advancement of technology.