Kenneth Shepard is professor of Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University, where his research group develops ultra-high-speed CMOS integrated circuits and their application to biological sensing. Shepard earned his undergraduate degree from Princeton University before completing his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Stanford University, where his fellowship began in 1987. His research at Columbia has produced CMOS chips capable of directly interfacing with DNA, proteins, and living cells, enabling new modalities of biosensing and neurological recording. He has developed integrated circuits that can sequence DNA electronically and measure the electrical activity of individual neurons with unprecedented resolution.