Principal Investigator:
Associate Professor David Tsai

I am an Associate Professor at UNSW. I joined UNSW as a Senior Lecturer in 2019, jointly appointed between Biomedical Engineering and Electrical Engineering, where I lead the Biomedical Microsystems Lab. Trained as an engineer. Practiced as one. Now training the next generation of engineers and building new technologies with real-world value.

I have been supported by prestigious Fellowships from the NHMRC (CJ Martin) and the Kavli Foundation. My team's research has been continuously funded by the NHMRC since 2013, including an ongoing Ideas grant on soft brain machine interfaces. Our research has appeared in journals such as Nature Communications and Nature Nanotechnology. With students, my research has won the Student Paper Award twice and Best Papers Award once, at the IEEE EMBC conferences. I have been awarded in excess of $5.5M in research funding since appointment to my current post (2019), and $6M career total (16 / 27 as CI-A). I work closely with the industry, including multi-national corporations, NGOs and government, sharing my expertise in integrated circuit technologies for positive socioeconomic impacts, through improved products, stakeholder engagements, and training. Our research on at-scale neurotechnology and CMOS microelectronics have also attracted industry collaborations internationally and within Australia (e.g. LeafLabs LLC, BlackRock Microsystems, and Contactile), backed by competitive funding schemes. Beyond creating new technologies, we are also very keen on sharing our devices with the research community, and on the closely related area of research data sharing and data format standardisation, with initiatives funded by the Australian Research Data Commons.

I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University in the City of New York, till 2019, joint between the labs of Prof. Kenneth Shepard (electrical engineering) and Prof. Rafael Yuste (neuroscience). I was promoted to Associate Research Scientist in 2017. In March 2019 I joined UNSW as Senior Lecturer, then promoted to Associate Professor in 2026.

Prior to the academia, I was with National ICT Australia and then CMCRC. These roles have resulted in products that became extremely successful internationally, been deployed into billions of consumer electronic devices and being used by essentially all major stock exchanges and investment houses globally.