Vladimir Vakther
Vladimir Vakhter received his Specialist (BS/MS) degree in Electronics & Automation of Physical Machines from Ural Federal University (UrFU), Russia, in 2016. As a Fulbright grantee, he received his M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), U.S., in 2021. He is now a Ph.D. candidate in ECE at WPI and a member of the Integrated Circuits and Systems Laboratory (ICAS LAB).
Vladimir’s current graduate research at ICAS focuses on custom mixed-signal integrated circuits and wearable systems for continuous, noninvasive, unheated monitoring of transcutaneous blood oxygen. He co-built the laboratory’s first fully functional miniaturized transcutaneous oxygen prototype (spanning hardware, firmware, software, and mechanical enclosures) and carried out the first extended human-subject tests of phosphorescence-lifetime transcutaneous oxygen sensing. He then designed, taped out, and tested a fully custom 180 nm CMOS mixed-signal chip, including both its analog front-end and digital co-processor. During his master’s at WPI, Vladimir focused on hardware security for miniaturized wireless biomedical devices, including injectable, implantable, ingestible, and wearable devices.
While at WPI, he interned at Cadence as a Software Engineering Intern, where he worked on algorithms for design rule checking in printed circuit boards, and twice at Analog Devices: as a Signal Processing Intern (2023), working on physical activity monitoring algorithms for wrist-worn wearables; and as a Systems Engineering Intern (2026), where he built several full-system prototypes (spanning hardware, firmware, software, and mechanical enclosures) for the company’s first FDA-cleared remote cardiopulmonary management wearable.
Before WPI, Vladimir conducted research on luminescent and scintillation materials at UrFU for two and a half years, developed a magneto-optical system for the analysis of ferromagnets at the Russian Academy of Sciences for two years, and completed two research internships in the Superconducting Quantum Circuits group at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, in 2014 and 2015. His professional experience before joining WPI includes work as an Electronics Engineer and a Software Developer.
Vladimir has authored 11 peer-reviewed publications. He is a co-inventor on two patent filings, one of which was licensed. He received the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Student Travel Grant Award (2026), was inducted as an Honorary Member of the National Academy of Inventors at WPI (2024), and completed the NIH Concept to Clinic: Commercializing Innovation (C3i) Program (2024). He has advised the student first authors of several conference papers and contributed IC design-flow documentation to the CEMiD program at UCLA. He served as Technology and Media Officer of the IEEE EMBS Boston Chapter (2022 to 2025), named the 2023 EMBS Professional Chapter of North America, and reviews for IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I and II, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems, BioCAS, ISCAS, and MWSCAS.