Grants, fellowships, awards and other honors that recognize and support innovative research and world-class teaching.
From the College of Social Sciences and Humanities:
Qianqian Zhang-Wu, assistant professor of English and director of multilingual writing, received multiple awards at the 2023 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), as well as a 2023 CCCC Research Initiative Grant.
Learn more about the award
From the College of Engineering:
Electrical and computer engineering associate professor Yanzhi Wang has received $450,000 in additional funding for his Young Investigator Award from Army Research Office. The project title is “Generalized Optimization Engine (GOE) for Deep Neural Networks”.
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Wei Xie, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, has received an award with a total value of $851,000 from the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals, for the project “Advanced FISH Assay and Mechanism Hybrid Surrogate to Improve mRNA Vaccine Potency Assessment and Prediction.”
Read more about the award and Xie’s research below.
Michael Kane, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, received a $750,000 award from the US Department of Energy to develop a training program for vocational technology high schools and community colleges that improves entry-level building operators’ literacy in grid-interactive efficient buildings.
Read more about Kane’s research and the award below.
Electrical and computer engineering principal research scientist Michele Polese, assistant professor Francesco Restuccia, and professor Tommaso Melodia were awarded a patent for “Coordination-free mmWave beam management with deep waveform learning.”
Read more about their patent below.
Electrical and computer engineering associate professor Josep Jornet received the Best Demo Award at the 24th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile) for the work titled “Adversarial Aerial Metasurfaces,” with electrical engineering student Sherif Badran, PhD’26, and collaborators at Rice and Brown Universities.
Find out more about the award below.
From the College on Engineering:
Chemical engineering distinguished teaching professor Lucas Landherr has received a $3,500 grant from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers Foundation to create a comic that details the work of chemical engineering for high school seniors and first-year college engineering students.
Find out more about Landherr’s work and this award below.
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“[Megan] Hofmann, a senior research fellow at Khoury College who will begin as an assistant professor this fall,” Matty Wasserman writes for the Khoury College of Computer Science, had been awarded with the SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award for her work “within the fields of human–computer interaction (HCI) and digital fabrication.”
Read more about Hofmann’s award-winning work below.
Professor and chair of electrical and computer engineering Srinivas Tadigadapa has been named as a Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors. The National Academy of Inventors “was founded in 2010 to recognize and encourage inventors with patents issued from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, enhance the visibility of academic technology and innovation, encourage the disclosure of intellectual property, educate, and mentor innovative students, and translate the inventions of its members to benefit society,” they write in their mission statement.
See the full list of 95 new Senior Members below.
Civil and environmental engineering lecturer and operations manager Rozanna Riley was selected to receive the Black Heritage Award, which is given to those Northeastern staff and administrators in recognition of their dedicated service to Northeastern, to the students, and/or to the John D. O’Bryant African American Institute.
In a new $3.1 million grant from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), Northeastern department of civil and environmental engineering chair and CDM Smith Professor Jerome Hajjar will lead a multi-institution team of researchers developing a new carbon sequestration technique using cross-laminated timber composite floor systems in bolted steel construction for building structures. The new structural method aims to decrease the use of steel while increasing the use of carbon-storing timber and design for deconstruction methods. The team envisions the research may enable widespread construction of carbon-negative multi-story buildings in the coming years.
Read more about the grant and Hajjar’s research below.
From the Khoury College of Computer Science:
Professor Byron Wallace “has been awarded Northeastern’s Sy and Laurie Sternberg Interdisciplinary Associate Professorship for his work” on applying machine learning and natural language processing to healthcare.
In an interview, Wallace gave one example of these applications: “the evolution of NLP systems [means they] can now spit out very plausible text, which medical practitioners can use to synthesize medical evidence and make better decisions for patient treatment.
Read the interview with Wallace, and learn more about his research, below.
Professor of psychology David DeSteno’s podcast “How God Works” is a finalist for “Best Personal Growth/Spirituality Podcast” in the Ambies, the top awards show in the podcast industry.
“How God Works” interrogates why, despite the fact that “religion and science often seem at odds, there’s one thing they can agree on: people who take part in spiritual practices tend to live longer, healthier, and happier lives.”
The Ambies award show takes place on March 7.
Read more about—and listen to—”How God Works” at the link below.
Electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Sarah Ostadabbas, professor Deniz Erdogmus and mechanical and industrial engineering associate professor Yi Zheng received MassVentures Acorn Innovation Awards to assist them in testing the viability of their technologies and potentially bringing their research to market.
Follow the link below to learn more about the awards and the professors’ research.
Assistant professor of finance Ali Sharifkhani has received the Riesman Professorship in the D’Amore-McKim School of Business. Sharifkhani will use the professorship to “study the effects of a firm’s local labor market on its exposure to macroeconomic risks and the expected return on its equity.”
Read more about the award and Sharifkhani’s work below.
Associate professor of accounting Kelvin Liu has received the Walsh Professorship from the D’Amore-McKim School of Business. He will use the professorship to “study the effect of diversity faultlines among senior executives on internal governance and corporate destabilization.”
Read more about the award and Liu’s work below.
According to the Association for Psychological Science, “The APS Rising Star designation is presented to outstanding APS Members in the earliest stages of their research career post-PhD…. this designation recognizes researchers whose innovative work has already advanced the field and signals great potential for their continued contributions.”
Professor of psychology and philosophy Jorge Morales was named an APS Rising Star in February, 2023.
Yakov Bart, associate professor of marketing and Joseph G. Riesman Research Professor at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business, has received a 2022 Amazon Research Award for a project titled “Using video summarization for generating effective short video ads.” This award “provides unrestricted funds and AWS Promotional Credits to academic researchers investigating various research topics in multiple disciplines,” according to Amazon Science.
The SMART Center at Northeastern University, whose mission statement “aims to conceive and pilot disruptive technological innovation in smart devices and systems,” has received a $4 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), under their Optomechanical Thermal Imaging program.
The SMART Center proposed the development of “Nano-opto-mechanical Piezoelectric Resonant Infrared-sensitive Metamaterials for Quantum-Limited Photodetection,” which would work to develop an exceptionally small detector of infrared light.
Learn more about the SMART Center at Northeastern University below.
Professor of electrical and computer engineering Bradley Lehman has been elected president of the IEEE Power Electronics Society. The Power Electronics Society studies “technology [that] encompasses the effective use of electronic components, the application of circuit theory and design techniques, and the development of analytical tools for efficient conversion, control, and condition of electric power,” they write on their website.
Click below to read more about the society.
Professor Kevin Fu was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for contributions to computer security, and especially to the secure engineering of medical devices.
Read more about Fu’s research and the fellowship below.
Four professors in the College of Engineering—Carolyn Lee-Parsons, Edmund Yeh, Ryan Koppes, and Yaning Li—are recipients of the Spring 2023 Spark Fund Awards. The awards provide support to commercially valuable inventions (from any field) from university researchers in earlier stages of development. The goal of the award is to advance a technology or suite of technologies from academia towards commercialization.
Read more about the professors and their research below.
Assistant professor Jiahe Li was awarded a $636,000 National Science Foundation CAREER award for a project titled “Understanding and Harnessing Host-derived Small RNAs Against Opportunistic Pathogens.”
Read more about the project and the award below.
Professor Matteo Rinaldi and research assistant professor Zhenyun Qian were awarded a patent for designing a “Zero power plasmonic microelectromechanical device.”
According to the abstract, the “device is capable of specifically sensing electromagnetic radiation and performing signal processing operations…. The devices can continuously monitor an environment and wake up an electronic circuit upon detection of a specific trigger signature of electromagnetic radiation.”
Read the full abstract and more about their patent below.
Qianqian Zhang-Wu, assistant professor of English and director of multilingual writing, has won the 2023 CCCC Research Impact Award for “Languaging Myths and Realities: Journeys of Chinese International Students.” The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) is a constituent organization within the National Council of Teachers of English.
Read more about the award below.
Teaching Professor Beverly Kris Jaeger-Helton was selected as a panel fellow for the 2023 National Science Foundation (NSF) CMMI Game Changer Academies for Advancing Research Innovation Program. The NSF Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI) created the Game Changer Academies for Advancing Research Innovation to improve group dynamics during panel discussions, increase awareness of bias and identity, and enhance understanding of high-risk, high-reward ideas. Once trained, “Panel Fellows” will bring enhanced skills and awareness when they participate in panel discussions during NSF merit review.