Jessilyn Dunn Receives IEEE EMBS Early Career Achievement Award

Jessilyn Dunn, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering and biostatistics & bioinformatics at Duke University, received the Early Career Achievement Award from the Institute of Electronics and Engineer’s (IEEE) Engineering Medicine & Biology Society (EMBS). The award celebrates early-career researchers who have made significant contributions to the field of biomedical engineering through innovative research design, product development, patents, or publications.

As the director of the Duke BIG IDEAs Lab (Biomedical Informatics Group: Integrating Data Engineering and Analytics), Dunn and her team explore how wearable devices, like smartwatches, fitness trackers and other biosensors, can identify digital biomarkers for diseases including heart disease, COVID-19, diabetes and the flu. By gathering data from these increasingly popular devices, Dunn hopes to transform abstract biometric data into actionable health insights.

“For a lot of these diseases, there is health data that shows that something was happening subtly for a longer period of time, and it got so bad that it led to something like a heart attack,” said Dunn. “We want to use the data from these tools and pair it with clinical data to indicate when someone may be at risk before these events happen.”

But the findings from these studies are only as accurate as the smartwatches themselves. For example, many wearables were advertised as being clinically validated, even when there was no set standard for these devices. This means that some companies could say that their heart rate measurements were accurate, even if they were only tested across a limited range of environments and body types.

Drawing from her expertise in both data science and biomedical engineering, Dunn and her team also explore new methods to assess and improve the accuracy of wearable technologies. In 2024, she received an NSF CAREER Award to address data bias and drift, two problems that have long plagued the accuracy of biosignal algorithms.

“Health happens 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” she said. “These tools give us an opportunity to provide health care tools to people who may not have easy access to standard healthcare in the first place, and we want to do everything we can to ensure that the data collected from these tools is accurate.”

“I am honored to receive the 2025 IEEE EMBS Early Career Achievement Award, and I look forward to continuing our research efforts and bringing the community together through IEEE meetings like the upcoming BSN and BHI conferences that I am helping co-organize this fall,” Dunn said.