IEEE Spectrum Identifies Article by BME’s Dmitry Kireev as One of Its Most Popular Stories of 2025

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Dmitry Kireev

Assistant Professor Dmitry Kireev of the UMass Amherst Biomedical Engineering (BME) Department has published one of IEEE Spectrum’s six most popular stories of the past year. IEEE Spectrum is the flagship magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a leading organization for professionals in engineering, computing, and technology. As IEEE Spectrum summarized the subject of Kireev’s article, published on February 3, 2025, “In Dmitry Kireev’s lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, researchers are developing imperceptibly thin graphene tattoos capable of monitoring your vital signs and more.” See https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-biomedical-stories-2025.

According to the IEEE Spectrum report on its six most popular stories of 2025, “These Graphene Tattoos Are Actually Biosensors.”

As Kireev wrote in his article for IEEE Spectrum, “Electronic tattoos could help people track complex medical conditions, including cardiovascular, metabolic, immune-system, and neurodegenerative diseases. Almost half of U.S. adults may be in the early stages of one or more of these disorders right now, although they don’t yet know it.”

According to the IEEE Spectrum report on its most popular stories, “How does it work? Graphene is conductive, strong, and flexible, able to measure features like heart rate and the presence of certain compounds in sweat. For now, the tattoos need to be plugged into a regular electronic circuit, but Kireev hopes that they will soon be integrated with smartwatches and thus simpler to wear.”

As Kireev wrote in the popular article he did for IEEE Spectrum, “Technologies that allow early-stage screening and health tracking long before serious problems show up will lead to better outcomes. We’ll be able to look at factors involved in disease, such as diet, physical activity, environmental exposure, and psychological circumstances. And we’ll be able to conduct long-term studies that track the vital signs of apparently healthy individuals as well as the parameters of their environments.”

Kireev added that such data could be transformative, leading to better treatments and preventive care. “But monitoring individuals over not just weeks or months but years can be achieved only with an engineering breakthrough: affordable sensors that ordinary people will use routinely as they go about their lives.” 

In his IEEE Spectrum article, Kireev concluded that “Building this technology is what’s motivating the work at my 2D Bioelectronics Lab, where we study atomically thin materials such as graphene. I believe these materials’ properties make them uniquely suited for advanced and unobtrusive biological monitors. My team is developing graphene electronic tattoos that anyone can place on their skin for chemical or physiological biosensing.”

Kireev’s Riccio College of Engineering website explained that his research interests lie mostly in the field of wearable and implantable bioelectronics: from applications of graphene and other 2D materials to wearable biosensors, bioelectronics, neuro-electronics, neuronal-networks measurements and in vivo probes, advanced biosensors, biomedical devices, and building next-generation 2D hybrids.

To support his pioneering research on graphene tattoos, Kireev has been utilizing a two-year grant of nearly $200,000 from the EArly-concept for Exploratory Research (EAGER) program of the National Science Foundation and an American Heart Association Career Development Award.