Congratulations to Connor Olsen, who successfully defended his doctoral dissertation in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Connor’s research asked what can be decoded from the wrist. Traditional myoelectric control records EMG from the forearm to drive bionic limbs. Connor moved the recording site to the wrist and worked on the two problems standing in the way: how the electrode meets the skin, and how we measure whether a myoelectric system is actually working.
That opened applications well past prosthetics. His grant-funded work at the Neilsen Rehabilitation Hospital lets patients control their room’s lights, blinds, and TV through hand gestures alone. He also led research on wrist EMG for gesture classification in stroke patients, and coauthored the lab’s 2025 Nature Communications paper on AI-controlled bionic hands.
Along the way he mentored a long line of undergraduate researchers, and built an onboarding program to get the next ones started faster.
Congratulations, Dr. Olsen. Well earned.
