Ching named chair of the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering
ShiNung Ching will succeed Bruno Sinopoli as chair Jan. 1, 2026
ShiNung Ching, professor and expert in neuroengineering, has been named chair of the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering (ESE), effective Jan. 1, 2026. He succeeds Bruno Sinopoli, who will become the chair of the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering at Arizona State University, after six years as chair of ESE.
“Over his 12 years on the faculty of the McKelvey School of Engineering, ShiNung has developed both a robust research agenda and impacted our educational offerings,” said Aaron F. Bobick, dean and the James M. McKelvey Professor. “He has deep collaborations with WashU Medicine and is one of the lead architects of the pending PhD program in neuroengineering. In addition to receiving a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, the Young Investigator Program award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and a Career Award at the Scientific Interface from the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund, ShiNung served as speaker of the Faculty Assembly and on the Academic Executive Committee, where he demonstrated thoughtful leadership regarding decisions that impact the whole school. I look forward to his rejoining that body in his role as ESE chair.”
Ching conducts research at the intersection of engineering and computational neuroscience, particularly in using systems and control theory to study the dynamics and function of neural circuits and networks. His research includes efforts to provide new scientific characterizations of brain function from data and models, as well as clinical work aimed at improving neural technology, including brain monitoring and neurostimulation for cognitive enhancement.
Among his active research endeavors include developing personalized medicine strategies for refractory depression that would tailor drug dosage based on a patient’s age, genetics, health conditions, brain dynamics and neural circuits. Funded by a four-year, $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health; developing a novel framework that will allow him and Todd Braver, professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences in Arts & Sciences, to create individualized brain models based on detailed data from noninvasive, high-temporal resolution brain scans.
After spending his formative years in upstate New York and eastern Canada, Ching earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical and computer engineering from McGill University and the University of Toronto, respectively. He earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan in 2009 and subsequently completed postdoctoral training in computational neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School. He has received more than $11 million in research funding from such agencies as the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Defense.
“I look at ESE as engineering in the biggest sense of the word. It is both the traditional view of how we design and construct things, but it's also a paradigm by which we come up with innovative solutions for complicated problems,” Ching said. “We try to give our students a rigorous quantitative and technologically oriented foundation, then empower them to use these tools and methods as a language to analyze, design and create. This allows our students to go out into the world prepared for high-level engineering careers as well as a wide array of other fields. In fact, many of our students in ESE go on to areas that you wouldn't typically associate with engineering, like management, business, finance and medicine. These are challenging domains where they are confronted with complex problems, and we think that the ways in which we train them to think prepare them for this in a unique way.”
For a look into Ching’s lab, click here.