USC’s Yasser Khan Receives DARPA Young Faculty Award to Develop Wearable Sensors for Monitoring Brain Injury

Detecting, tracking and treating traumatic brain injury (TBI) is notoriously difficult, especially as doctors often struggle to detect subtle or evolving neural damage, track how it progresses and determine how a patient is responding to treatment.

While brain scans such as CT and MRI can provide critical diagnostic information, they offer a static snapshot and can miss mild or ongoing damage and inflammation.

USC engineer Yasser Khan aims to tackle this gap by developing a new generation of wearable sensors that could detect physiological and chemical signals associated with neural damage, enabling earlier detection, continuous monitoring and real-time insight into treatment progress.

Khan's approach will be explored through a new study funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), following his selection as a 2026 Young Faculty Award recipient.

Through this study, he plans to explore how miniaturized chemical sensors could be combined with physiological sensing in a wearable device to detect biomarkers associated with inflammation and neural injury - tackling key limitations in today's brain-sensing technologies.

Titled "ISF-Integrated Multimodal Patch for Stress Burden Estimation and Neural Damage Prediction," the project builds on Khan's broader work at the intersection of wearable technology, sensing and neuroscience.

"My lab's mission is to come up with sensing technologies that can find out what's happening in the brain in a noninvasive manner," Khan said.

The project will combine multiple types of sensing, physiological measurements related to stress alongside chemical biomarkers associated with neural damage, in a compact wearable platform like a patch.

Beyond traumatic brain injury, the approach could eventually support broader applications in neuroscience and digital health, including monitoring inflammation, treatment response and other changes in brain and body function.

The DARPA Young Faculty Award supports junior faculty at U.S. academic and nonprofit research institutions through funding, mentorship and connections to national security and industry experts. Khan's project will receive approximately $700,000 during its two-year base period, with the potential for a one-year extension that would bring total funding to approximately $1.2 million.

Khan emphasized that research at the intersection of engineering and medicine is made possible by USC's interdisciplinary environment. He is teaming up with Keck School of Medicine of USC neurosurgeons Charles Liu and Darrin Lee, who will help facilitate future clinical validation and patient testing following the necessary Department of Defense and USC regulatory approvals.

"USC is a place where we can do this type of work," Khan said, citing access to neurosurgeons, brain-scanning facilities, cleanrooms and advanced sensor fabrication labs.

Khan is an Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair and assistant professor in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and USC Mark and Mary Stevens School of Computing and AI's Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He also has joint appointments in the Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering, leads Khan Lab and is part of the USC Institute for Technology and Medical Systems (ITEMS), a joint Keck-Viterbi initiative on medical devices with a presence in both USC Viterbi and the USC Keck School of Medicine.

Liu is a professor of clinical neurological surgery, surgery, psychiatry and the behavioral sciences, and biomedical engineering, with a joint appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. He also directs the USC Neurorestoration Center.

Lee is an associate professor of neurological surgery, psychiatry and the behavioral sciences, and biomedical engineering.

Putting Advanced Brain Sensing on a Patch

The technology Khan's team will develop will measure physiological signals associated with stress alongside chemical biomarkers linked to inflammation and neural damage.

A key innovation will be the miniaturization of chemical-sensing transistors, which would be fabricated using advanced semiconductor nanofabrication techniques.

For patients with TBI, the technology could provide a continuous stream of information rather than relying solely on periodic clinical assessments. By monitoring stress-related physiological signals and biomarkers associated with inflammation and neural damage at the same time, the wearable could give doctors a more complete picture of a patient's condition over time.

That insight could help clinicians detect signs of neural damage earlier, track changes in a patient's condition and evaluate treatment progress. In the longer term, the system could support more personalized care by helping doctors monitor medication response and recovery outside of a hospital setting.

The approach also reflects Khan Lab's broader focus on using wearable technologies to better understand the relationship between the brain and behavior. By shrinking chemical sensing technologies into a wearable platform, Khan's team hopes to make signals that are difficult to capture today more accessible for continuous monitoring.

This latest recognition builds on a series of honors Khan has received for his research on wearable, implantable and ingestible electronics, including the 2025 Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award, the 2025 IEEE Sensors Council Early Career Technical Achievement Award, the 2024 Packard Fellowship and the 2023 Google Research Scholar Award.

Published on October 14th, 2026

Last updated on October 14th, 2026