Celebrate Northeastern’s accomplished community
Every year, members of the Northeastern community surpass expectations and accomplish feats that show what it means to live #Like a Husky. Meet the Northeastern students, faculty, staff and graduates who have attained incredible achievements in their fields and beyond. Scroll through their stories below.
Award-winning students
Recognized for historical research, scientific discovery, and academic distinction, these are Northeastern’s most esteemed students.
Maren Ritterbuck, fourth-year bioengineering and biochemistry student and one of three 2026 Barry Goldwater Scholarship winners.
“Being selected as a Goldwater Scholar marks the start of what I hope will be a long career in science working on projects that help people around me. … (It) has strengthened my confidence in both myself and my research abilities, empowering me to set ambitious goals for the next stages of my scientific career.”
Melina Coy, fifth-year political science and business student and Gideon Klein Holocaust Legacy Foundation Scholarship recipient.
“By reading these letters that still exist, it preserves that memory in some way. At a time when the Holocaust history is being increasingly denied, reading this raw, emotional suffering and pain of these people is the least we can do.”
Campus leaders
These are the students who lead with purpose, drive change and inspire those around them across our global campuses.
Brooke Rhode, president of Northeastern’s International Relations Council.
“I’ve gained so many hard skills, my research abilities have improved, I’m better at problem-solving on the fly, and I feel much more confident overall. It’s done wonders for my public speaking.”
Ganesh Danke, fourth-year computer science student and president of the Northeastern Satellite Lab.
“We’re demonstrating that this isn’t just a hypothetical — that Northeastern students can really do this. … As we’ve grown larger and larger, we’ve really had the objective of having a permanent space at Northeastern — to be a permanent resource for spacecraft engineering and space-related research.”
Reese Balemian, first-year economics student and winner of Voices of NU Oakland.
“I chose Northeastern Oakland over schools with 40,000 students. And I wondered if I made the wrong choice. But instead, I found something better. A campus where belonging isn’t something you’re given. It’s something you build, conversation by conversation, room by room, awkward wave by awkward wave.”
Influential alumni
After graduation, these Huskies continue to show their excellence, taking their spirit, integrity and academic passion around the world.
Lauren Conrow, graduate of business administration and 2026 Luce Scholar.
“It’s really about seeing human settlements as a collective, and not as ‘This is my house’ [for which] we are all individually responsible.”
Oye Owolewa, doctoral graduate in pharmacy now pursuing a D.C. Council seat.
“Being a pharmacist, being somebody who lives in a marginalized community and still has relationships outside of the district, gave me the confidence to run for this seat.”
Laurel Walsh, graduate of biochemistry and art, received a 2026 NIH Oxford-Cambridge doctoral scholarship.
“It’s such an insane thing to be able to say you’ve been able to see the inside of a mosquito’s brain on the level of individual synapses. I’m really, really lucky to have (had) exposure to some really cool projects.”
Victoria Sinel, graduate in artificial intelligence and data science, won Woman of the Year in the 2025 Women in Tech Excellence Awards Tech & Consultancy category.
“When you have one group of people building tech for the wider population, no doubt there is going to be bias. The general population is being impacted because the tech being built for them is not being built by them — and that’s why representation really matters.”
Debbie Madueke, graduate in economics and business administration and one of two 2026 Schwarzman Scholars.
“I’m excited to tap into Tsinghua’s strong links to China’s innovation ecosystem and better understand how innovation is fostered and scaled within that environment. I’m also interested in how China approaches its relationships with other countries, particularly across the Global South.”
Honored faculty
Learn more about the faculty who earned recognition for their extraordinary contributions to teaching, research, and scholarship.
Aatmesh Shrivastava, newly elected senior member of the National Academy of Inventors and associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.
“I want to thank all the people I’ve worked with, the department [of engineering] in general – and my students – they make it possible for this volume of work to come together.”
Gregory Abowd, dean of Northeastern University’s College of Engineering and one of two fellows elected into the National Academy of Inventors.
“It’s a great honor. A lot of it is because I have been successful in working with innovative students who have wanted to see technology and their research go the next step, and I’ve had some very good partners outside of academia to work with.”
Eduardo Sontag, distinguished bioengineering and electrical and computer engineering professor inducted into the National Academy of Sciences.
“How do you tackle a problem? You tackle it in its completeness. No notion of sending a half-baked idea, but you do a good job at it.”
Lorenzo Torresani, professor of computer vision and multimodal learning and one of three appointed Joseph E. Aoun chairs.
“Because cameras will always be on, it will know everything that I’ve seen, and so I can ask, ‘Hey, assistant, where did I misplace my keys?’ The system will look back from that moment in time to my user memory to see where it was last.”
Yonina Eldar, professor of electrical engineering and one of three appointed Joseph E. Aoun chairs.
“It’s not necessarily just about the research; it’s also about giving them [the students] tools, confidence, creativity and a desire to really push themselves in using their talents to improve human lives and the world. … A lab is a place where you can have people from very different backgrounds, from different cultures, abilities and political views — and they can all work together.”
Excellence in teaching and mentorship
These educators were recognized for the craft, curiosity and care they bring into every classroom, from legal lessons to conversations about what AI can and can’t do.
Mary Jo Ondrechen, professor of chemistry and chemical biology and winner of the 2026 Lifetime Mentor Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
“I want [my mentees] to believe in themselves. Whatever they’re working on, I want them to feel like it’s theirs and whatever has been achieved, that they can be proud of because they did it.”
Erin Islo, assistant professor of law and 2026 University Excellence in Teaching Award winner.
“If you ask anyone about the main courses that I teach, civil procedure and federal courts, they have the reputation for being the most technical and some would say boring … and most difficult classes. I think I’m able to teach the courses in a way that shows how important even very technical procedural issues in the law can be.”
Michelle Carr, who teaches film and TV production, won the 2026 University Global Educator Award.
“I’m a huge advocate for students doing some sort of global experience because I know that when I finally did it, it changed my entire life. I thought differently, I had more confidence, I knew what I wanted to do and I knew that I could overcome things that came my way … and that there were different cultures and different ways of doing things and thinking.”
Koen Pauwels, distinguished professor of marketing and winner of the 62nd annual Robert D. Klein University Lecturer Award.
“AI is getting better, and that’s exactly why being genuinely you is becoming more, not less, valuable. It’s up to you to choose to do with that what you want.”
Helen Dawe, head of bioscience and chemistry at Northeastern London.
“What I’m hearing when I talk to employers consistently is that it’s not a problem with a lack of talent in the workforce. It’s often a mismatch between what people are trained to do and what the job role all of a sudden demands, which might be quite different to what they were recruited to do.”
Research breakthroughs
Faculty researchers push the boundaries of what’s possible, earning the awards that come only with decades of field-defining work.
Yizhi You, assistant professor of physics at Northeastern and 2026 Cottrell Scholar.
“For classical computing, this is not a problem, but for quantum computing, that dissipation plays an important role. If you want to store quantum information for a long period of time, then you have to figure out whether dissipations would destroy that information.”
Soheil Behnezhad, assistant professor of computer science and one of two 2026 Sloan Foundation fellows.
“[The fellowship recognition] motivates me to keep pushing and designing more efficient algorithms.”
Alessandro Vespignani, director of Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute, received the 2025 European Physical Society’s Statistical and Nonlinear Physics prize.
“Post-pandemic, work, school, travel, and social mixing have all rebalanced in uneven ways, and if we keep using old contact assumptions we will misread transmission risk and mis-time preparedness.”
Laurel Gabard-Durnam, assistant psychology professor, director of Northeastern University’s Plasticity in Neurodevelopment Lab at and winner of the 2026 Boyd McCandless Award from the American Psychological Association.
“How do we even quantify some of the more complex experiences that we have as humans?”
The power of experience
These are just a few of the many students who have gained real-world expertise through Northeastern’s renowned co-op and experiential learning programs, shaping their careers and futures.
Lilly D’Italia, fourth-year communications studies student, went to Panama for her second co-op experience.
“Doing a co-op like this taught me there are other routes you can take that are less traditional, but bring the same amount of creative and intellectual output. That was important for me to learn and see with my own eyes.”
Fiorella Cordero, third-year business administration student, spent eight months on a co-op with BoConcept, an international furniture company.
“It was a great experience to [oversee] a cultural change in an organization.”
Lexi Liu, Northeastern Vancouver graduate of computer science, interned and was later hired by the software company Highspot.
“I wasn’t even thinking about a job, because I was just grateful for this internship. But it was the internship that made me feel very interested in becoming an engineer. … Before I got my internship, I would look at those people and wonder, ‘What are they working on?’ And, ‘what would it take to be one of them?’”
Shubh Thorat, fourth-year student studying computer science, developed an AI-driven migration system during a co-op at Amazon Web Services.
“My mentor (at AWS) always told me one thing, I think that’s also how he operates, where he was like: ‘I don’t want you to do some project which won’t be used after you leave. I want it to be something so relevant that tomorrow we can take this from you and we can make it into a full-fledged thing and we can use it internally.”
Jenna Woods, environmental science and public policy graduate student, studied the mineral olivine during a co-op and was later hired as the CEO of AngelRock.
“I love AngelRock. It’s really shown me how important it is to wake up knowing that you’re doing something that you feel really attached to and is really important. I would love to continue doing what I’m doing.”
