Here & Now‘s Peter O’Dowd speaks with Northeastern University Senior Vice President for External Affairs Mike Armini about the university’s decision to require that students be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 before returning to campus for full-time, in-person classes in the fall.

Depending on which denominator you use, your risk-benefit calculation is very different—the good of the many, the few, or the one? “Grossly put, physicians treat the patient, and epidemiologists treat the population,” says Sam Scarpino, head of the Emergent Epidemics Lab at Northeastern University. “But for infectious diseases, the distinction between the patient and the […]

To understand this and other factors in voting, my Northeastern University research team studied wait times and attitudes during the November 2020 presidential election. As part of that project, we partnered with YouGov to conduct a survey of 1,750 Americans, weighted to be nationally representative, that probed Americans’ willingness to wait in line to vote.

Much of the research uses small samples with varying degrees of rigor, and more needs to be studied about how a patient’s activity in the virtual world translates into improved performance in the physical world, said Danielle Levac, an assistant professor in the department of physical therapy, movement and rehabilitation sciences at Northeastern University. 

That effort to separate Chauvin from police was “a wise choice” to appeal to any jurors who might be uneasy with some of the sharpest criticisms of police and calls to reform or defund them, said Daniel S. Medwed, a law professor at Northeastern University. “They didn’t want to make it a trial about policing, […]

Voice-based assistants encode biases present in the training examples. These include accent understanding, gender bias, geographic bias, religious bias and so on. Awareness of these biases is the first step. In the near future I expect research will be carried out to understand the impact of these biases on consumers—in the same way that biases […]

A poll released in March by a consortium that includes Northeastern, Harvard, Rutgers, and Northwestern universities also found Massachusetts with the lowest percentage among the states of residents who said they “would not get the COVID-19 vaccine.” Samuel Scarpino, an epidemiologist at Northeastern University, said it was good news that people in Massachusetts are receptive to getting […]

This rise in violence comes after 2020, which saw the start of the pandemic and the smallest number of mass killings in more than a decade, according to a database compiled by The Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University.

Daniel Medwed, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University’s School of Law, said the state has had a much easier time making their case considering the magnitude of their central piece of evidence: video of Floyd’s death. “It’s often said a picture’s worth 1000 words,” he told VICE News. “And with that video, what are […]

Since 2006, there have been 14 workplace massacres with at least four people killed that stemmed from employment grievances, according to the Associated Press/USA Today/Northeastern University Mass Killing Database (of which I am one of the principals).

Mass shootings in American workplaces are not a new phenomenon, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University. In one of the most notorious examples, a mail carrier in trouble with his supervisors opened fire in a crowded post office in Oklahoma, killing 14 workers and injuring seven others before killing himself. The violent attack in […]

James Alan Fox is the Lipman Professor of Criminology, Law and Public Policy at Northeastern University and a member of the USA TODAY Board of Contributors.