Network science research expands to four cities on two continents across Northeastern’s global network
The Network Science Institute is leading the way on some of the world’s most pressing issues, predicting the next global pandemic and the impact of AI, by fostering collaboration across fields and continents.
Alessandro Vespignani’s life is consumed by connections.
He’ll be the first to tell you they define every aspect of our lives, from the neurons in human brains to the diseases spreading across the globe. But not everyone has more than 100 researchers to study those connections.
To do that work required Vespignani, the Sternberg Distinguished Family Professor at Northeastern University, to build something unlike anything that exists in higher education: a true global network of trailblazing researchers that collaborates across disciplines and continents to understand and answer some of the most pressing global issues. Leveraging Northeastern’s interconnected global network of 14 campuses, the Network Science Institute, or NetSI, has evolved from a Boston-based initiative into one spread across four cities and two continents. NetSI’s global presence grants it the kind of reach that most research institutes can only dream of, opening the doors for research that pushes boundaries in everything from political science to artificial intelligence.
“The big challenges that we are facing scientifically now are not local problems,” Vespignani said in an interview with Northeastern Global News. “We talk about population displacement, climate change, pandemics, the impact of artificial intelligence. … The more you can, as researchers and research teams, work across different places, the more you can really study different aspects and learn different lessons.”
At its most basic, network science is the study of nodes and links, purposefully abstract concepts that can apply to any number of ideas. The internet, airlines, social media, genes and AI are all part of networks with individual yet connected parts.
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“That’s why we are interdisciplinary because we go from problems in political science down to the hard, foundational math,” Vespignani said. “But we all have a common language, we all have a common interest, common methodologies.”
Today, the research group has teams working on large-scale projects on three of Northeastern’s 14 campuses. Established on Northeastern’s Boston campus in 2015, NetSI expanded to include hubs in Northeastern’s London campus and the Roux Institute in Portland, Maine in 2022. More than 120 researchers who hail from countries across the globe, from the U.S. and Mexico to Italy and India, now work at the institute and it will soon expand to Northeastern’s healthcare-focused Charlotte, North Carolina campus.
NetSI researchers are experts-on-the-go, regularly visiting one another to discuss research or attend conferences, like the upcoming NetSci 2026 Conference. The flagship event for the Network Science Society, the conference, which NetSI is scheduled to host on June 1, will bring researchers from across the world to Boston. Likewise, students are encouraged to travel from hub to hub depending on what their research requires.
“I see this as a real distributed network in which each node is a peer and then through their interactions we can multiply the effect of each one of those nodes,” Vespignani said.
Operating at a global scale impacts every aspect of NetSI’s work, from the research itself to the funding and talent behind it.
Having a team that spans locations and expertise is a huge asset for researchers like Andreia Sofia Teixeira, an associate professor and NetSI researcher at Northeastern’s London campus. Teixeira, who leads NetSI’s Behavioral Research and Adaptive Networks Lab (BRAN Lab), is a computer scientist by training who studies the interplay between human brain and social relationships. Her work necessitates the interdisciplinary collaboration that NetSI fosters.
“Having access to people who are experts in fields or topics that I might not have the training in, it ends up elevating all the work that we are able to do and the potential impact it might have,” Teixeira said.
The opportunity to work with experts she would never otherwise collaborate with was enticing for Haily Merritt, an American postdoctoral researcher now working in London alongside Teixeira.
“It means that there’s always exciting directions for growth or learning new things from the people that I work with,” Merritt said.
These collaborations result in NetSI projects like Epistorm, a U.S.-based national infectious disease tracker that brings together not only researchers from across Northeastern’s global campus network, but faculty from other universities and members of the public and private sectors. Those connections would be well beyond the institute’s reach if it were just on a single campus.
Each location brings its own unique array of industries and environmental factors that benefit research. The researchers in London have more ready access to the U.K. Biobank, a dataset that includes biological information for half a million people. For Vespignani and his work with Epistorm, Northeastern’s Roux Institute in Portland, ME, and its partnerships with the Maine Department of Health and Human Services and the state’s largest healthcare provider, Maine Health, help NetSI connect with rural communities that are often left out of public health research.
“We have a place where we can do studies that no one else can do,” Vespignani said. “This flexibility, this broad portfolio, really has a huge payoff.
On a logistical level, NetSI’s global network is a boon for the grant funding process and allows researchers to not only explore new funding opportunities but share the load of a resource-intensive application process.
“I’m applying with some faculty in Boston right now for some grants that are only available in the U.S. but the expertise is only in London,” said Giovanni Petri, a professor and NetSI researcher at Northeastern’s London campus. “The capacity of doing this in a concerted way, a coordinated way, within the university makes a lot of these things a lot easier.”
This global network approach could also help respond to costly brain drains that both the U.S. and U.K. face as highly trained workers leave for other countries.
“When we set up the team in London, it was clear that we were tapping into a talent pool of people that … were buying into our vision, but they wanted to be close to the U.K.,” Vespignani said. “That was a way for us to hire first rate people that would have been impossible to hire in a different context.”
The institute has no plans to stop expanding either. Ajitesth Srivastava, NetSI’s first Charlotte campus hire, will join Northeastern in the fall as an associate professor of AI and health. In NetSI, he saw the perfect research environment for his public health-focused network science work, which has tackled issues such as infectious diseases and suicide risk.
“You can come up with better ideas, you can improve each other’s ideas and just do better science,” Srivastava said of NetSI’s networked approach.
The institute is also expanding into new areas of network science. It recently established a research group, NetSI Sport, that will draw on the institute’s faculty across its network to analyze sports statistics and the movements of teams and players across thousands games, potentially helping them predict the outcome of games.
But one of NetSI’s biggest focuses moving forward will be AI and its interactions with humans, a topic of concern as people form increasingly strong yet potentially problematic relationships with AI agents.
It is “the most puzzling and at the same time complex system we have ever built,” Vespignani said. Analyzing these relationships will be vital if humanity hopes to deploy the technology to its benefit, not its detriment, Vespignani said.
“These artificial intelligences, they have agency in the world,” Vespignani said. “If we don’t understand how the system works, all the questions about artificial intelligence will be unanswered, even how we regulate the system.”
Northeastern University will host the Network Science Society’s NetSci 2026 Conference from June 1 to 5 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. To register for the event, visit the official NetSci 2026 website.
