Matthew Coughlin, Class of 2025, has been awarded a prestigious fully funded graduate scholarship at Stanford University.
While attending Northeastern University, Matthew Coughlin made the most of every opportunity.
The 2025 graduate studied mechanical engineering with a minor in math, completed two co-ops and conducted research at Northeastern, MIT, the University of Delaware and Stanford University. He also joined the student government in his first year and eventually became its president, working to improve the student experience at Northeastern.
Those efforts paid off. Coughlin was recently awarded the Knight-Hennessy Scholarship, which will fund three years of his graduate studies at Stanford. The program selects scholars from around the world who demonstrate independence of thought, leadership and a civic mindset, and prepares them for leadership roles in academia, industry, government and nonprofit sectors.
“It appealed to me,” Coughlin says, “because it builds an interdisciplinary cohort of students across all disciplines, and it fosters that interdisciplinary collaboration. I see a lot of value in such interdisciplinary work, because that’s how you realize very impactful solutions.”
He believes that no single breakthrough in one field is enough to bring transformative change to the world.
“It takes innovation in a field, combined with innovation in other fields, and requires synthesizing those advances to execute [impactful changes],” Coughlin says. “I put in my Knight-Hennessey application because I wanted to develop this broader skill set.”
In addition to the Knight-Hennessy Scholarship, Coughlin also received the highly competitive National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. He plans to continue working on thermal management issues in high-performance computing.
“There’s a strong demand for additional computer power,” he says. “We look towards an era that is not just dictated by AI, but more broadly, data science and a desire in every industry to have enormous data sets and be able to drive insights from them.”
But to process more data and train more AI models, engineers must fit more computing power into the same computer chips.
“It ends up being a thermally limited problem,” Coughlin says. “If we make computer chips any more dense, they overheat and they destroy themselves.”
Coughlin says that numbers made more sense to him than trying to memorize how to spell words from a young age. His natural inclination to STEM fields led him to pursue engineering — a field in which he could apply fundamental concepts from math and physics to real-world challenges.
Coughlin, who grew up in Sharon, Massachusetts, chose Northeastern for its strong engineering program, urban location and a vibrant undergraduate community.
“It offered a very robust extracurricular scene and a good social environment,” he says.
His first research opportunity came in his first year, when he was able to work in a biomechanics lab at MIT on a pump system. Using image processing algorithms, the lab measured and characterized microfluidic flows that dictate forces experienced by biological systems.
“If you want your system to be physiologically relevant, [you need to] mimic what is found in reality,” Coughlin says. “That gave me some experience with both the bio application side of mechanical engineering, but also the computing, the processing side.”
During his first co-op, he worked at Blue Origin, a space technology company. Coughlin did configuration management, ensuring that different parts of a space rocket were consistent with requirements and engineering specifications to operate reliably and predictably.
While completing his co-op, Coughlin realized that he wanted to pursue more academic research.
After attending a workshop with Northeastern’s Undergraduate Research and Fellowships office, he secured his first Research Experience for Undergraduates grant from the National Science Foundation and spent the summer at the University of Delaware.
“There’s a lot of value in experiencing changes in the environment, because every institution does things a little differently,” he says. “You can gain a lot just by working somewhere that isn’t your home base.”
In Delaware, he developed software to control lab instruments for studying localized magnetic fields inside nanomaterials for quantum computing applications.
“[I] very much enjoyed that experience, but I realized maybe material science isn’t so much my forte,” he says.
Coughlin later secured two more REU grants for research opportunities at Stanford, where he found his passion for thermofluids and thermal transport. He studied the thermal conductivity of liquid metals and explored their use in high-performance computing systems.
“I absolutely loved it,” he says.
To continue with this topic, Coughlin applied for a co-op at Northeastern’s Multiphase Transport Research Lab, led by Xiaoyu Tang, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering. The co-op was funded by an AJC Merit Research Scholarship from the Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships.
Coughlin studied the physics of the Saffman-Taylor instability, which happens when a less viscous fluid pushes into a more viscous one, creating finger-like patterns instead of a smooth flow. He participated in all stages of the research process, from identifying the central research question to preparing the findings for publication.
To continue this research in his last semester at Northeastern, Coughlin pursued the Project-Based Exploration for the Advancement of Knowledge Summit Award from Northeastern. He is continuing to work part time at the lab this summer.
Coughlin is also wrapping up a term as president of Northeastern’s Student Government Association. He joined SGA in his first year and gradually became an advocate for organizational reform.
“My view of my time in SGA is that it was all about building the groundwork for us to be very effective at fulfilling our mission,” he says. “And this meant providing a lot of the operational framework that everything else is built from.”
As executive vice president in his third year, he led the implementation of those changes.
“I was able to provide, I think, a lot of support to the rest of our teams doing the advocacy work and encourage people to be high-impact performers and high-impact student leaders,” Coughlin says.
Together with running mate Cassidy Donoghue, he campaigned for stronger connections between students and administrators, more engaging campus events and better resources for student organizations.
“We were able to deliver real change that was actually benefiting students,” Coughlin says. “It was a nice capstone to my time here.”