Campus Directory

Pronouns she, her, her, hers, herself

Division Baskin School of Engineering

Department/College/Unit Electrical and Computer Engineering

Title Associate Professor

Affiliation Faculty

Other UCSC Campus Affiliation Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP)

Faculty Type Regular Faculty

Web Site

Primary Office Location Engineering Building 2
243A

Mail Stop SOE2

Biography, Education and Training

I am an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). Before joining UCSC in July of 2019, I was an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (January 2017 – June 2019), and was a Postdoctoral Fellow (April 2014 – December 2016) in the Department of Radiology at Stanford University. I received my PhD from the University of Waterloo, Canada in 2014 in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.

Over the past 5 years I have been funded by NIH, DOD, and DOE to develop novel detectors and instrumentation for a wide range of applications. I am a Senior Member of IEEE (2020 - present) and serving as an Editor of IEEE Sensors, as well as a Chair of Physics of Medical Imaging at the SPIE Medical Imaging conference. 

I  combine my system-level knowledge of materials science, physics, computation, and  electrical engineering and I foster a collaborative environment to develop detectors and instruments for early cancer detection in medical imaging, and anomaly detection in high energy physics, and security applications. 

Summary of Expertise

Shiva Abbaszadeh’s research focuses on developing new instrumentation, computational approaches, and measurement techniques for radiation detection and biomedical imaging. Her overall goal is to further our understanding of disease mechanisms and visualize and detect cancer at the molecular level. Her current projects aim to advance the sensitivity and spatial and temporal resolutions of radiation emission (optical, gamma rays, positrons) to achieve high-quantitative accuracy and image quality of molecular probes in vivo.

Research Interests

• Imaging detector technology
• Biomedical sensors
• Image processing and statistical performance assessment
• Instrumentation for emission tomography (PET and SPECT)
• Liquids and glassy materials
• Nanomaterial-mediated radiation therapy
• Novel isotope identification algorithms
• Radiological Science
• Mixed-signal circuit design

Teaching Interests

ECE171

ECE171L

ECE80B

ECE293

Awards, Honors and Grants

UC Women’s Initiative for Professional Development (2021-2022)

Scialog Fellow for Advancing Bioimaging (2021-2023)

SNMMI Tracy Lynn Faber Memorial Award (2021)

Innovative Mentorship Program Funding Award (2020)

AE3 Collins Scholars Program Graduate(2017)

Stanford Molecular Imaging Scholars Fellowship (2014-2016) 

Stanford’s Jump Start Award for Excellence in Research (2016)

IEEE Medical Imaging Conference Trainee Grants (2014, 2015, 2016 )