Associate Professor, University of Washington; Research Scientist, Google
UW Major: History and Pre-Med
That question took shape over a career defined by research — a throughline Sunshine traces back to his time at UW–Madison. He was driven by innovation and attracted to research and big, open-ended questions, while also feeling drawn to work that could serve communities. Sunshine credits faculty mentors like Joel Rogers and Lewis Friedland for supporting his early research and instilling the importance of doing rigorous work that had the potential to benefit the greater good. “The Wisconsin Idea — generating new knowledge and building with an eye toward helping the community — is very real, and my work fits squarely within that paradigm,” he says.
After graduating, Sunshine carried that mindset to medical school, where his interests centered around public health. He earned his medical and master of science degrees from the University of Washington Schools of Medicine and Public Health, then completed his internship and residency in anesthesiology. As a physician-scientist in the operating room, he worked in a highly monitored environment where patients are continuously tracked with sensors that measure vital signs. This made him wonder what monitoring might look like outside of the OR and whether there could be a way to use sensors to detect time-critical signals when someone wasn’t in the hospital.
Sunshine started by focusing on a vexing public health challenge — cardiac arrest — an event with known changes to vital signs and well-established interventions (CPR and defibrillation), yet people often don’t receive help or it’s initiated too late. In cardiac arrest, survival often depends on rapid recognition and fast intervention.
At the University of Washington in 2019, Sunshine cofounded a spinout, Sound Life Sciences, to translate his research into real-world technology. His team received FDA clearance for a first-of-its-kind smartphone-based contactless monitor used to measure breathing. When Google acquired the company in 2022, Sunshine transitioned to leading a larger team there that innovated on this approach and extended his work to wearable technology.
Through interdisciplinary collaboration, Sunshine and his team developed a smartwatch feature that can detect loss of pulse — a sign of cardiac arrest — and automatically contact emergency services. Last year, the feature was cleared by the FDA and the research underlying the system was published in Nature. Sunshine emphasizes that “it takes a village to build medical-grade systems on consumer devices like phones and wearables and deploy them at scale.”
Sunshine is now focused on expanding access to these capabilities. He points to past safety innovations like smoke detectors and seatbelts, which took decades to become widely accepted and universally deployed. Although it may take time for his work to reach its full potential, the goal is clear: connecting people to care more efficiently during their most critical moments to help increase their chances of survival.