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For teaching computers to see, Northeastern professor receives eminent achievement award
A leading researcher in the field of computer vision — which uses artificial intelligence to process images received from cameras that “mimic human eyes” — Yun Raymond Fu, distinguished professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering, has received the 2024 Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award for making “impactful contributions” over a nearly 20-year career.
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‘Covalent Inhibition of Pro-Apoptotic BAX’
“BCL-2-associated X protein (BAX) is a promising therapeutic target for activating or restraining apoptosis in diseases of pathologic cell survival or cell death, respectively. In response to cellular stress, BAX transforms from a quiescent cytosolic monomer into a toxic oligomer. … In this study, we performed a disulfide tethering screen to discover C126-reactive molecules that modulate BAX activity. We identified covalent BAX inhibitor 1 (CBI1) as a compound that selectively derivatizes BAX at C126 and inhibits BAX activation by triggering ligands or point mutagenesis.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Nature Chemical Biology.
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Vision paper: ‘Towards Mobility Data Science’
“Mobility data captures the locations of moving objects such as humans, animals and cars. With the availability of GPS-equipped mobile devices and other inexpensive location-tracking technologies, mobility data is collected ubiquitously. In recent years, the use of mobility data has demonstrated significant impact in various domains including traffic management, urban planning and health sciences. In this paper, we present the emerging domain of mobility data science. Towards a unified approach to mobility data science, we envision a pipeline having the following components: mobility data collection, cleaning, analysis, management and privacy.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘Distributed Cognition Approach to Understanding Compensatory Calendaring Cognitive Systems of Older Adults With Mild Cognitive Impairment’
“While consumer digital calendars are widely used for appointment reminders, they do not fulfill all of the compensatory functions that are supported by calendars designed for cognitive rehabilitation therapies. … We employed a Distributed Cognition framework to elucidate how older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and their care partners manage calendaring details when supported by a traditional rehabilitation calendar. … We used a Distributed Cognition framing to articulate information flows and breakdowns in participants’ calendaring systems.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence proceedings.
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‘An Efficient OFDM-Based Monostatic Radar Design for Multitarget Detection’
“In this paper, we propose a monostatic radar design for multitarget detection based on orthogonal-frequency division multiplexing, where the monostatic radar is co-located with the transmit antenna. The monostatic antenna has the perfect knowledge of the transmitted signal and listens to echoes coming from the reflection of fixed or moving targets. We estimate the target parameters, i.e., range and velocity, using a two-dimensional periodogram. By this setup we improve the periodogram estimation performance under the condition of low signal-to-noise ratio using Zadoff-Chu precoding and the discrete Fourier transform channel estimation.” Find the paper and authors list at IEEE Access.
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‘DREiMac: Dimensionality Reduction With Eilenberg-MacLane Coordinates’
“DREiMac is a library for topological data coordinatization, visualization, and dimensionality reduction. Currently, DREiMac is able to find topology-preserving representations of point clouds taking values in the circle, in higher dimensional tori, in the real and complex projective spaces, and in lens spaces. In a few words, DREiMac takes as input a point cloud together with a topological feature of the point cloud (in the form of a persistent cohomology class), and returns a map from the point cloud to a well-understood topological space.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the Journal of Open Source Software.
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Halacheva receives NSF grant for representation theory research
“This project delves into several research directions within representation theory, which is the mathematical framework for studying objects through their symmetries and the operations which preserve them. Such operations can carry a classical, or even more intriguingly a quantum algebraic structure. … Quantum groups and the theory surrounding them are now a thriving source of uncovering new mathematical principles. This project will develop a richer understanding of this theory by building a common ground for combining algebraic, combinatorial and higher-structural categorical techniques for the study of quantum groups and associated diagram algebras.”
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Zhu receives NSF grant for ‘Microlocal Analysis and Singularities’
“Degenerations and singularity formations play important roles in the study of differential geometry and arise naturally in multiple other areas of mathematics, including, algebraic geometry, mathematical physics, number theory and representation theory. This project concerns the geometry of singularities and has interesting connections with an array of disciplines including modeling of electromagnetic systems, gauge theory and string theory. Building on her track record, the PI plans to use effective techniques to solve a wide variety of problems and discover new and sharper analytic results. Alongside her research, the PI will engage in various outreach activities.”
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Laredo receives NSF grant to bridge ‘classical and quantum symmetries’
“This project stems from the recent discovery that quantum groups naturally arise from the Stokes data of differential equations associated to classical symmetries. The main goals are to further explore this bridge between classical and quantum symmetries. Of particular interest is the extension to difference equations, which are natural discretisations of differential equations, and whose Stokes data are not well-understood beyond the one-variable case. Another important direction will the study of the integrable systems, or constants of motion, corresponding to these differential and difference equations. The project will provide research training opportunities for graduate students.”
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Hughes receives funding for maintenance of eelgrass seeds
“This project,” funded by the Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game, “funds a research assistant to collect and maintain a supply of eelgrass seeds that can be used in restoration efforts. They will also help MA DMF develop best practices for seed collection, storage, and distribution in support of state-wide restoration projects.”
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Bi receives NIH grant for ‘biophysical modeling for collective tissue mechanics’
“Organ surfaces, made of epithelial or endothelial cells, serve as physical barriers. These cells are generally static but can transition to a dynamic, migratory state during physiological processes like development and repair. … Key questions remain about how curvature affects cell collective movement and the mechanics of multilayered tissues like mammalian epidermis. … To address these gaps, I plan to develop computational models that go beyond the conventional 2D approach, incorporating curved and multilayered 3D surfaces. This will include new models exploring the biomechanical relationship between nuclear shapes and cell proliferation.”
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Ferrins receives ACS Medicinal Chemistry Predoctoral Fellowship
“This fellowship funds a year of research in the field of medicinal chemistry through a sponsorship by Genentech.”
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“This grant is from the NSF Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) program and aims to accelerate the discovery and deployment of multi-layer twisted 2D systems for quantum optoelectronics.”
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Seitz receives NIH grant to study working memory
“This proposal aims to improve the rigor and reproducibility of research on plasticity in human working memory (WM), and related executive functions (EFs) in adolescent youth. We address a critical gap between research and practice that is characterized by a growing commercial space marketing cognitive training approaches (with WM being one of the most common targets), which are particularly catering to typically developing children and those diagnosed with ADHD to improve mental health and scholastic performance.”
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Schultz receives NOAA grant to study carbon dioxide removal
“This project will focus on two [carbon dioxide removal] approaches with direct influence on the ocean sediment: seaweed farming and further sinking into the deep ocean and restoration of ‘blue carbon’ coastal ecosystem, more specifically cessation of bottom trawling to preserve sediment carbon. We will do so by developing a new model for the ocean sediment and benthos that can be coupled to existing ocean models to simulate these strategies and quantify their effect on the carbon cycle as well as understand potential feedbacks that could impact the ocean ecosystem.”
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Auclair receives funding to bring biotechnology to high schools
Amgen Biotech Experience (ABE) Massachusetts Jared Auclair has received the Amgen Biotech Experience Massachusetts grant, which includes multi-year funding “to bring biotechnology to the high school classrooms throughout Massachusetts. It consists of professional development for teachers and deployment of curriculum into high school classrooms.”
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Aramaki receives NASA funding for gamma ray and antimatter survey
“This grant is for the prototype balloon flight of the GRAMS (Gamma-Ray and AntiMatter Survey) Project. GRAMS mission aims to deliver unprecedented sensitivities to astrophysical observations with MeV gamma rays and indirect dark matter searches with antimatter using a cost-effective, large-scale LArTPC (Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber) detector. We will build and optimize a small-scale detector, MiniGRAMS, and demonstrate its performance in the balloon flight scheduled in late 2025 or early 2026.”
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Dong receives DOE grant for quantum algorithm research
“Simulating the electronic structure of molecular systems using noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices is one of the most promising applications of quantum computing. Large-scale electronic structure and dynamics simulations, such as excited-state simulations of large molecules or a large number of molecules, are instrumental to the development of next-generation technology for energy applications. In this project, we will develop a framework that efficiently translates quantum algorithms from a gate-based quantum computing model to one that can be efficiently run on a near-term quantum annealer to enable large-scale electronic structure theory simulations across different quantum computing architectures.”
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Ivanov receives funding for mass spectrometry workflow research
“Funded by an NIH P41 subaward, this project from the Biomedical Technology Development and Dissemination Center aims to translate native mass spectrometry (nMS) workflows for characterizing macromolecular complexes to biomedical research communities. The provided tools support both expert and non-expert users in integrating nMS with other structural biology techniques throughout the project. This initiative seeks to accelerate the production of models for complex protein machines and macromolecular structures, addressing challenges in standard structural biology and enhancing insights into cellular processes and human disease.”
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Krioukov receives NSF grant for ‘Projective Limits of Sparse Graphs’
“This project aims to analyze and identify well-behaved graph limits for sparse random graph models, specifically focusing on influential models developed in the investigator’s previous NSF-funded research related to real-world networks. The goal is to ensure that conclusions drawn from these models are realistic by verifying that their limits are graphides.”
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Whitfield-Gabrieli receives funding for fMRI research for people with borderline personality disorder
“In collaboration with McLean Hospital, this study aims to reduce the symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) in young adults by using real-time mindfulness-based neurofeedback during an fMRI scan. This technique helps augment mindfulness meditation by showing participants a visual display of their brain activity in the fMRI scanner. Participants will track BPD symptoms and mindfulness skills via ecological momentary assessment (EMA), which involves brief daily, smartphone-delivered surveys.”
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Garcia to study ‘Adaptation in the Amazon’ with TNC funding
“The Adaptation in the Amazon Research Technician will work with PI Gabriela Garcia (MES and SPPUA) to support The Nature Conservancy’s global team to understand climate impacts and adaptation needs of communities in the Amazon region and how nature-based approaches can support equitable adaptation goals. They will support the selection, adaptation, implementation and analysis of risk and vulnerability assessment in four countries (Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador) of the Amazon region.”
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Dos Santos wins award for the treatment of drug-resistant infection
Thiago dos Santos has won the Hanna H. Gray Fellow’s Program Transition Award. “Our group will study the proteins that build the bacterial cell envelope and develop mechanism-based inhibitors of these proteins to treat multidrug-resistant infections.”
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Ionescu wins NIH funding to study skeletal repair after injuries
“In this project, the investigators study the role of growth plate stem cells in hopes of gaining insights in the skeletal repair process after physical injury in children. The results of the study will help bioengineering efforts directed towards growth plate cartilage regeneration.”
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Apfeld receives grant to study lifespan extension in worms
“Can a worm that normally lives 15 days live a year? How much can we extend lifespan if we combine multiple interventions that extend lifespan on their own? We are excited to find out how plastic is the lifespan of C. elegans worms.”
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The Ocean Census project aims to discover 100,000 species in the next 10 years
Knowledge remains “the most important ingredient in protecting the planet,” says Dan Distel, research professor in biology and marine and environmental sciences at Northeastern University. The Ocean Census project, a collaboration between universities and environmental institutes across the globe, will accelerate the taxonomic process, adding to scientists’ understanding of how marine environments function.