Early last year, shortly before Covid began shutting down the U.S., I reached out to two of the researchers who had been studying this phenomenon, Muhammad Ali and Piotr Sapiezynski of Northeastern University.

“Having a hate-crime law tells victims of hate crimes that ‘you matter and we’ll take it seriously if somebody hurts you,’” said Northeastern University criminology professor Jack McDevitt.

Meanwhile, as needle exchanges grow nationwide, similar disputes have flared up in California and Washington state. “It’s easy to beat up on West Virginia, but this is a nationwide problem, and these kinds of disputes are happening all over the country,” Leo Beletsky, a public health law expert at Northeastern University, told BuzzFeed News.

The police departments will open up their arrest files and ask researchers from the University of Southern Maine and Northeastern University to do a deep dive into the data.

“Federal government: This was paid for by taxpayer dollars. You don’t really have the right to delete or remove it,” Sara Wylie, an associate professor at Northeastern University and a cofounder of EDGI, told The Verge last year.

A vaccine’s ability to block transmission doesn’t need to be 100% to make a difference. Even 70% effectiveness would be “amazing”, says Samuel Scarpino, a network scientist who studies infectious diseases at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. But there could still be a substantial amount of virus spread that would make it a lot harder […]

The University of Southern Maine’s Cutler Institute and Northeastern University’s Institute on Race and Justice will undertake a 12-month study of three years of policing data from each city to determine whether either department’s enforcement activities have been biased against people of color. Jack McDevitt, director of Northeastern’s Institute on Race and Justice, said he […]

“Pretty much across the board the distribution has been grossly unequal,” said Sam Scarpino, a researcher studying infectious disease dynamics at Northeastern University. “One of the big concerns is that the result will be pockets of communities that are well protected, and pockets that are vulnerable.”

Boston-based Northeastern University is looking to open a campus in Rosslyn, not only to host graduate-level classes but also to grow its nearly $160 million federal contract and grant portfolio.

“Already, flight control could be completely automated,” said Tommaso Melodia, Director of the Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things at Northeastern University, in a recent interview. But humans are the X factor, he noted. “I think a lot of people still feel like they want an additional degree of human interaction with a machine instead of relying […]

Alan Klein, an anthropology professor at Northeastern University in Boston who has written extensively on Dominican baseball, said that the role was born out of MLB’s desire to unearth the country’s deep talent. “Inadvertently, [the league] created the modern buscone,” Klein told the Guardian. 

Alessandro Vespignani, a complex-network theorist at Northeastern University, refers to this research as his “wartime” work—tactical and occasionally messy but producing the immediate, numerical results that policy makers and health-care workers need.