Assistant Professor
Biography
Professor Ching was previously a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School-Massachusetts General Hospital and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He will join the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis as an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering in May 2013.
In addition to authoring articles in both engineering and basic science journals, Professor Ching is the lead author of the textbook Quasilinear Control (Cambridge University Press, 2011). In 2012, Professor Ching was awarded a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface. This award is granted to early career researchers with backgrounds in engineering and the applied sciences, who are using methodologies from these fields to pursue research questions of biological and medical relevance
Research
In his research, Professor Ching has made contributions to systems and control engineering, as well as basic neuroscience and clinical engineering. He has most recently used control and dynamical systems theory to offer new insights into the mechanisms of general anesthesia and to develop new methods for closed loop control of pharmacological coma states.
Professor Ching’s research lies at the interface between systems and control engineering and neural medicine. His research projects will be interdisciplinary, focusing on questions in systems theory as well as basic science and clinical applications. He is particularly interested in the use of control theory and dynamical systems to elucidate brain network dynamics, mechanisms of neuroactive drugs and closed-loop methods for drug delivery and clinical management of pathological physiologic states.
Selected Publications
Ching, S., Eun, Y., Gokcek, C., Kabamba, P.T., & Meerkov, S.M, Quasilinear Control, February 2011, Cambridge University Press, ISBN: 9781107000568
Ching, S., Purdon, P.L., Vijayan, S., Kopell, N.J., & Brown, E.N., A neurophysiological-metabolic model for burst-suppression, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 109 No. 8, p3095-3100, Feb 2012
Ching, S., Kabamba, P. T. & Meerkov, S. M., Boosting: A Method for Recovery of Linear Performance in Systems with Nonlinear Instrumentation, Journal of Dynamical Systems, Measurement and Control, Vol. 134, No. 1, Jan 2012
Ching, S., Cimenser, A., Purdon, P.L., Brown, E.N., & Kopell, N.J., Thalamocortical model for a propofol-induced alpha rhythm associated with loss of consciousness, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 107, No. 52, pp 22665-22670, Dec 2010
Ching, S., Kabamba, P. T. & Meerkov, S. M., Simultaneous Design of Controllers and Instrumentation: ILQR/ILQG, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Volume 55, Issue 1, Jan 2010
Selected Research
“Towards treatments in disorders of consciousness and new models of general anesthesia,” Burroughs-Wellcome Fund, Career Award at the Scientific Interface, 7/2012-2017