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  • Hughes receives Ramboll US grant to study genetic variation in restored salt marshes

    “Genetic variation can be critical for population performance and resilience, yet it is seldom accounted for in habitat restoration efforts. This project will assess the genetic diversity of the dominant salt marsh plants Spartina alterniflora and Spartina patens in natural marshes in and around Belle Isle Marsh, MA. We will also produce local stocks of each of these species from seed and compare their genetic and phenotypic diversity in a common greenhouse environment. This work will inform ongoing and future marsh restoration efforts in Belle Isle and the surrounding region.”

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  • Manetsch receives NIH grant to research new candidate to treat Chagas disease

    “Chagas disease, caused by the protozoan parasite Trypanosoma cruzi, is endemic in the Americas, but has also globalized due to human migration. Despite being one of the major causes of infection-induced heart disease worldwide, current therapies for Chagas disease have inconsistent efficacy and frequent side effects. A major contributor to treatment failure is thought to be the transiently dormant intracellular forms of T. cruzi. … The newly discovered benzoxaborole AN15368 represents the first extensively validated and safe clinical candidate for the treatment of Chagas disease. … This proposal aims to gain additional understanding of this processing step for AN15368 as…

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  • Wanunu receives NIH grant to develop ‘next-generation single-molecule protein sequencer’

    “In this multi-PI project between the Wanunu Lab (Northeastern), Chen Lab (UMass Amherst), Aksimentiev Lab (Urbana Champaign), and Niederweis Lab (U Alabama), we will develop a next-generation single-molecule protein sequencer based on engineered high-resolution nanopores.”

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  • Photomedical group receives $2.7M grant for ovarian cancer research

    “The Spring research group, in collaboration with the Enderling Lab at Moffit Cancer Center, has been awarded a Physical Sciences Oncology Network grant (NCI U01 CA280849; ~$2.7M) titled ‘Fractionated Photoimmunotherapy To Harness Low-Dose Immunostimulation in Ovarian Cancer.’ The project will harness an integrated experimental-mathematical oncology approach to decipher how to best harness immune sparing and immune stimulation of fractionated photoimmunotherapy to personalize treatments for advanced or recurrent ovarian cancer patients with presently dismal survival rates.”

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  • Levine receives NSF grant to study ‘cell-fate trajectories’

    “We propose a joint theoretical/experimental research program to address cell-fate trajectories that occur during induction of EMT, the epithelial-mesenchymal transition. Specifically, recent efforts have indicated that epithelial cells can either undergo direct reprogramming to mesenchymal states or alternatively become more stem-like and exhibit hybrid E/M properties. Based on our preliminary investigations, we will use state-of-the-art single cell measurement technology together with advanced mathematical modelling frameworks to understand how cells choose specific fates and to quantitatively unravel the genetic and epigenetic dynamics that leads these cells along their particular trajectories.”

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  • How will the ecology of the Baltic Sea be affected by changing ocean conditions?

    Katie Lotterhos, professor of marine and environmental sciences, has received funding from the University of Gothenburg for a project titled, “A Seascape of Adaptations: Testing Models That Predict Performance in Multivariate Environments.” The researchers wrote that, “We are studying the adaptation of eelgrass to future ocean conditions in the Baltic Sea.”

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  • Dong receives NSF funding for ‘Enzyme-Mimicking Catalysts for Cellulose Processing’

    “Lignocellulosic biomass from plants is a renewable, carbon-neutral material produced at a scale of 170-200 billion tons per year. The depolymerization of cellulose is a key step in biomass conversion, but it is challenged by the stability and crystalline nature of the cellulose fibers. We will develop synthetic catalysts based on molecularly imprinted nanoparticles that mimic endocellulase, exocellulase and beta-glucosidase for the efficient hydrolysis of cellulose.” The title of the project is “Collaborative Research: Enzyme-Mimicking Catalysts for Cellulose Processing.”

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  • Brown receives DFCI funding for drug delivery in ‘metastatic, resistant breast cancer’ cases

    “The objective of this work is to generate clinically relevant data to support the use of PARPi in combination with local and systemic drug delivery platforms of STING agonists in order to treat metastatic, resistant breast cancer.”

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  • NIH supports Deming’s research into negative mood and its relation to the brain

    “Negative mood is a common feature of anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, [inflicting] immeasurable human suffering. … There is no mechanistic explanation for how negative affect is caused in the brain. A solution to this barrier can be found in predictive processing, an emerging paradigm for unifying brain mechanisms across emotion, cognition, perception, movement and other psychological domains. … I will take advantage of a conceptual innovation from our lab and thirty years of tract-tracing studies in mammals to test the hypothesis that prediction signals and prediction error signals can be traced across specific layers of cerebral cortex and…

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  • ‘Work Strains and Disabilities in French Workers: A Career-Long Retrospective Study’

    “This study aims to estimate the causal impact of detrimental working conditions on the self-reported disabilities in France. Using a retrospective lifelong panel, we implement a mixed econometric strategy that relies on difference-in-differences and matching methods to take into account for selection biases as well as unobserved heterogeneity. Deleterious effects from exposure on disability are found. … These results provide insights into the debate on legal retirement age postponement and justify policies being enacted early in individuals’ careers, but also schemes that are more focused on psychosocial risk factors.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Labour.

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  • Center for Research Innovation awards $300K to ‘commercially valuable inventions’

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    “The Spark Fund supports commercially valuable inventions from university researchers in earlier stages of development,” the Center for Research Innovation wrote, “from any field. The goal of the award is to advance a technology or suite of technologies from academia toward commercialization.” Each cycle, award recipients receive a grant up to $50,000. In Fall 2023, those recipients were professors Rebecca Carrier, Eno Ebong, Randall Erb, Leigh Plant, Dori Woods and Yi Zheng. Follow the link to read more about their individual projects.

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  • ‘Why Look at Dead Animals?’ asks Coughlin in provocative taxidermy study

    “Lion Attacking a Dromedary was a sensational object for its first viewers at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1867. … As we now know, the Verreaux brothers embedded human remains in the figure of the rider that had formerly been assumed to be just a clothed mannequin. … This essay suggests that theoretical tools derived from Material Ecocriticism and Monster Theory that may help us to think about, or alongside, the affective power of this disturbing taxidermy assemblage, ever aware that this piece draws its power from the theatrical, colonial violence of extraction and extinction.”

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  • ‘Deep Bayesian Active Learning for Accelerating Stochastic Simulation’

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    “Stochastic simulations such as large-scale, spatiotemporal, age-structured epidemic models are computationally expensive at fine-grained resolution. While deep surrogate models can speed up the simulations, doing so for stochastic simulations and with active learning approaches is an underexplored area. We propose Interactive Neural Process (INP), a deep Bayesian active learning framework for learning deep surrogate models to accelerate stochastic simulations. INP consists of two components, a spatiotemporal surrogate model built upon Neural Process (NP) family and an acquisition function for active learning.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining proceedings.

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  • ‘Disentangling Node Attributes From Graph Topology for Improved Generalizability in Link Prediction’

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    “Link prediction is a crucial task in graph machine learning with diverse applications. We explore the interplay between node attributes and graph topology and demonstrate that incorporating pre-trained node attributes improves the generalization power of link prediction models. Our proposed method, UPNA (Unsupervised Pre-training of Node Attributes), solves the inductive link prediction problem by learning a function that takes a pair of node attributes and predicts the probability of an edge, as opposed to Graph Neural Networks, … which can be prone to topological shortcuts in graphs with power-law degree distribution.” Find the paper and full list of authors at…

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  • ‘Can Euclidean Symmetry Be Leveraged in Reinforcement Learning and Planning?’

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    “In robotic tasks, changes in reference frames typically do not influence the underlying physical properties of the system, which has been known as invariance of physical laws.These changes, which preserve distance, encompass isometric transformations such as translations, rotations, and reflections, collectively known as the Euclidean group. In this work, we delve into the design of improved learning algorithms for reinforcement learning and planning tasks that possess Euclidean group symmetry.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.

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  • ‘Leveraging Structure for Improved Classification of Grouped Biased Data’

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    “We consider semi-supervised binary classification for applications in which data points are naturally grouped … and the labeled data is biased. … The groups overlap in the feature space and consequently the input-output patterns are related across the groups. To model the inherent structure in such data, we assume the partition-projected class-conditional invariance across groups. … We demonstrate that under this assumption, the group carries additional information about the class, over the group-agnostic features, with provably improved area under the ROC curve.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence proceedings.

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  • ‘Accelerating Neural MCTS Algorithms Using Neural Sub-Net Structures’

    “Neural MCTS algorithms are a combination of Deep Neural Networks and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and have successfully trained Reinforcement Learning agents in a tabula-rasa way. … However, these algorithms … take a long time to converge, which requires high computational power and electrical energy. It also becomes difficult for researchers without cutting-edge hardware to pursue Neural MCTS research. We propose Step-MCTS, a novel algorithm that uses subnet structures, each of which simulates a tree that provides a lookahead for exploration.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems…

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  • ‘Sustainable HCI Under Water: Opportunities for Research with Oceans, Coastal Communities and Marine Systems’

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    “Although the world’s oceans play a critical role in human well-being, they have not been a primary focus of the sustainable HCI (SHCI) community to date. In this paper, we present a scoping review to show how concerns with the oceans are threaded throughout the broader SHCI literature and to find new research opportunities. We identify several themes that could benefit from focused SHCI research, including marine food sources, culture and coastal communities, ocean conservation, and marine climate change impacts and adaptation strategies.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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  • ‘Opportunities for Nature-Based Solutions To Contribute to Climate-Resilient Development Pathways’

    “There is potential for nature-based solutions (NbS) to contribute to climate-resilient development (CRD) due to their integrated approach to mitigation, adaptation, and sustainable development. … A CRD pathways (CRDP) approach helps to analyze the complexities of the relationship between CRD and NbS, and a climate justice lens enables the identification of the multiple ways that NbS can support or undermine CRD. … We present a framework that combines climate justice and CRDP in an analytical tool for understanding the potential for a NbS to support CRD.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability.

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  • ‘Rapid Convergence: The Outcomes of Making PPE During a Healthcare Crisis’

    “The U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH) 3D Print Exchange is a public, open-source repository for 3D printable medical device designs with contributions from clinicians, expert-amateur makers, and people from industry and academia. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the NIH formed a collection to foster submissions of low-cost, locally manufacturable personal protective equipment (PPE). We evaluated the 623 submissions in this collection … [and] found an immediate design convergence to manufacturing-focused remixes of a few initial designs affiliated with NIH partners and major for-profit groups.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction.

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  • ‘OPTIMISM: Enabling Collaborative Implementation of Domain Specific Metaheuristic Optimization’

    “For non-technical domain experts and designers it can be a substantial challenge to create designs that meet domain specific goals. This presents an opportunity to create specialized tools that produce optimized designs in the domain. However, implementing domain-specific optimization methods requires a rare combination of programming and domain expertise. … We present OPTIMISM, a toolkit which enables programmers and domain experts to collaboratively implement an optimization component of design tools.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems proceedings.

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  • ‘The First COVID Wave: Comparing Experiences of Adults Age 50 and Older in the U.S. and Europe’

    “The first wave of COVID-19, from March to September 2020, had significant health, social, and financial consequences for older Americans and their European peers. Comparing their COVID-19 experiences is important for understanding the variable impacts of the pandemic. … During the first COVID-19 wave, older Americans were much more likely than their European peers to report at least one of the four adverse COVID-19 experiences we studied. These experiences could have lasting effects on older adults in the U.S.” Find the paper and full list of authors at The Commonwealth Fund.

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  • How a deep dive into the internet’s vital protocols earned a ‘Best Paper’ honor

    Milton Posner, for the Khoury College of Computer Science, details how “A Formal Analysis of Karn’s Algorithm,” a paper written by professor Cristina Nita-Rotaru, PhD. student Max von Hippel, and “Lenore Zuck at the University of Illinois Chicago, and Ken McMillan at the University of Texas at Austin,” has won a best paper award for its exploration of a protocol important to the basic functioning of the internet.

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  • ‘Closing the Gap in Merger Enforcement’

    “Most mergers in industries with only a handful of competitors are anticompetitive, so why don’t we block them?” asks Neal F. Finnegan Distinguished Professor of Economics John Kwoka. “The fix is to use a structural presumption to lower the burden for regulators,” he argues, stating that “a well-designed merger enforcement policy should focus on mergers with the greatest likelihood of anticompetitive outcomes,” which has not recently been true of United States policy.

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  • ‘Documentary Film and Institutional Behavioral Change: A Student-Driven Mobilization for Sustainability’

    “There are multiple methods available to convey the need for sustainability. However, most often communications are limited to one discipline or one instructional medium, which limits engagement and even interest. In the summer of 2021, students at Northeastern University working with their faculty advisor, adopted a multidisciplinary approach to discussing sustainability by producing a documentary film. The subject of the film is waste resulting from convenience consumption of coffee at the University’s multiple coffee shops.” Find this book chapter and the full list of authors in Educating the Sustainability Leaders of the Future.

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  • Ozone Tattoo project empowers citizen scientists to track pollution in their communities

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    The revolutionary Ozone Tattoo project, created by professor Dietmar Offenhuber, teaches observers how to identify the specific damage patterns of ground-level ozone on plant leaves. The project is now a Falling Walls 2023 award winner.

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  • Understanding human decision-making during supply chains shortages

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    “Research conducted by mechanical and industrial engineering associate professor Jacqueline Griffin, professor Ozlem Ergun, and professor Stacy Marsella [in the Khoury College of Computer science, titled] ‘Agent-Based Modeling of Human Decision-Makers Under Uncertain Information During Supply Chain Shortages’ was published in the proceedings from the 2023 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.”

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  • ‘Aligning Economic Measurement With Well-Being: Sustainability’

    “Gross domestic product (GDP) has been the prevailing global metric for measuring economic growth for the past 70 years. This is the same time period that is credited with the observation of manmade climate change. … To the extent that market prices and participants do not include holistic impacts of resource use and instead determine value based on immediate gratification, GDP growth is correlated with negative externalities, which impose limits on the future quality of life. … In this chapter, we explore how GDP gained traction on a global scale and how the indicator is tied to climate change.”

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  • ‘The Interplay Among Savings Accounts and Network-Based Financial Arrangements: Evidence From a Field Experiment’

    “This paper studies how formal financial access affects network-based financial arrangements. We use a field experiment that granted access to a savings account to a random subset of households in 19 Nepalese villages. Exploiting a unique panel dataset that follows all bilateral informal financial transactions before and after the intervention, we show that households that were offered access to an account increased their loans and total transfers to others, independent of the treatment status of the receiver.” Find the paper and full list of authors at The Economic Journal.

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  • ‘Small Business Lending and the Bank-Branch Network’

    “I examine the role of bank’s distance to the borrower and the proximity of other lenders for the transmission of financial shocks across the bank network. I use a novel dataset of small business lending based on information from the Community Reinvestment Act, which measures lending at census tract groups within each county and yields rich variation. … I document that small banks with increased liquidity from proximity to local oil booms, originate more loans to firms far from these booms, and lenders with above-average geographic exposure to residential booms reduce lending in census tract groups with stable house prices.”

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