Ada Poon

Ada Poon, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University School of Engineering

Research Description: After working at a large corporation and an early-stage startup in consumer electronics, Dr. Poon returned to academia, and switched her research area to bioelectronics for advancing clinical treatments and basic biomedical research. Compared to pharmaceutical drugs which manipulate biological activities related to a disease state based on biochemistry and molecular biology, microelectronics can modulate biological activities with exquisite spatial and temporal resolution by modifying the neural impulses that control the body, and thus hold promise as a new class of medical intervention that may be more effective than drugs which act globally throughout the body. Dr. Poon’s research focuses on making such treatments practical. She is investigating endocrine systems including adipose tissue manipulation to activate non-shivering thermogenesis for the treatment of obesity, and an electronic pancreatic system in collaboration with Dr. Justin Annes. This latter project attempts to combine genetically engineered cells and microelectronics to achieve durable output of insulin and glucagon, and to control and monitor their release in vivo.

Selected relevant publications (Stanford DRC members in BOLD):

  1. Tajima K, Ikeda K, Tanabe Y, Thomson EA, Yoneshiro T, Oguri Y, Ferro MD, Poon ASY, Kajimura S. Wireless optogenetics protects against obesity via stimulation of non-canonical fat thermogenesis. Nat Commun. 2020 Apr 7;11(1):1730. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-15589-y. PMID: 32265443; PMCID: PMC7138828. 

  2. Song S, Amores D, Chen C, McConnell K, Oh B, Poon A, George PM. Controlling properties of human neural progenitor cells using 2D and 3D conductive polymer scaffolds. Sci Rep. 2019 Dec 20;9(1):19565. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-56021-w. PMID: 31863072; PMCID: PMC6925212.