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  • Ruobing Bai receives 2022 EML Young Investigator Award

    “Assistant Professor Ruobing Bai is a recipient of the 2022 Extreme Mechanics Letters (EML) Young Investigator Award for his paper ‘Temperature-modulated photomechanical actuation of photoactive liquid crystal elastomers.’ The EML Young Investigator Award honors the best young researchers who have published their highly impactful papers in the EML journal.”

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  • Professor Yun Raymond Fu awarded patent for ‘Multi-Person Pose Estimation Using Skeleton Prediction’

    The patent offers “Embodiments [that] provide functionality for identifying joints and limbs in images.”

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  • ‘Manipulating Polydispersity of Lens β-Crystallins Using Divalent Cations Demonstrates Evidence of Calcium Regulation’

    “Of the three most common vertebrate subtypes, β-crystallins exhibit the widest degree of polydispersity … [and] it is unclear why there is such a high degree of structural complexity within the β-crystallin subtype. … While the direct, physiological relevance of these divalent cations in the lens is still under investigation, our results support that specific isoforms of β-crystallin modulate polydispersity through multiple chemical equilibria and that this native state is disrupted by cation binding.” Read the paper and find the full list of authors in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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  • Topology, symmetry and quantum band theory

    In this review, “Topology and Symmetry in Quantum Materials,” the authors present an overview of “band theory,” and “presents a cross section through the recent work on understanding the role of geometry and topology in generating topological states and their responses to external stimuli, and as a basis for connecting theory and experiment within the band theory framework.” Find the paper and the full list of authors at Advanced Materials.

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  • Rotating shapes with the mind: Perspectives from psychology and philosophy

    Northeastern University professor of psychology and philosophy Jorge Morales, along with frequent collaborator Chaz Firestone of Johns Hopkins University, provide a review of new research conducted by E.E.M. Stewart, et al., “Mental object rotation based on two-dimensional visual representations.” This paper, they say, describes how “a core assumption” about spacial thinking “has missed something important about the perceiver’s point-of-view.” Read their review, “Visual cognition: A new perspective on mental rotation,” in Current Biology.

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  • Modeling floodplain lakes after extreme flooding

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    This study of floodplain lakes—which accumulate “sediments, organic matter, and pollutants”—adds to our understanding of their evolution, especially after flooding events. While pre-existing models of floodplain lake evolution exist, they are “not well suited to guide the interpretation of individual flood events in sedimentary records.” This paper “combine[s] sediment samples collected in and around a floodplain lake with hydraulic modelling simulations to examine inundation, flow velocity, and sedimentation patterns,” especially helpful after “extreme” flood events. Read “A Hydraulic Modelling Approach to Study Flood Sediment Deposition in Floodplain Lakes” and find the full list of authors in Earth Surface Processes and…

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  • Why was ‘Maus’ banned?

    In response to a Tennessee ban on Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel “Maus,” professor of English and art + design Hillary Chute has authored a new article in The Atlantic, “Why Maus was banned: What makes the book controversial is exactly what makes it valuable.” The article (behind a paywall) goes into what makes the graphic novel, about Spiegelman’s father’s experience of the holocaust, both provocative and important. Chute previously edited “Maus Now,” a collection of critical writings on the graphic novel.

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  • ‘Quench Dynamics in the One-Dimensional Mass-Imbalanced Ionic Hubbard Model’

    “Using the time-dependent Lanczos method, we study the non-equilibrium dynamics of the one-dimensional ionic-mass imbalanced Hubbard chain driven by a quantum quench of the on-site Coulomb interaction, where the system is prepared in the ground state of the Hamiltonian with a different Hubbard interaction. A full exact diagonalization is adopted to study the zero temperature phase diagram in equilibrium, which is shown to be in good agreement with previous studies using density matrix renormalization group (DMRG).” See the full list of authors and read their research in ArXiv.

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  • Music is good for the brain, and not just among professionals

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    This study, “Musical Experience Relates to Insula-Based Functional Connectivity in Older Adults,” a collaboration between the department of physical therapy, the department of music and the department of psychology at Northeastern University, in addition to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, looked at “general musical experiences” across a subject’s lifespan, particularly in older adults. Their findings show that “older adults with more musical experience showed greater functional connectivity” between insulae and various regions of the brain. “Sensorimotor function and cognitive control” especially seem to benefit. See the full list of authors and read their research in Brain Sciences.

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  • Advances made against trypanosomiasis, ‘sleeping sickness’

    Researchers compared the perturbations of proteins in response to two treatments to human African trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness. The workflow identified the differences between NEU-4438 (“a lead for the development of drugs against Trypanosoma brucei,” the parasite responsible for sleeping sickness) and acoziborole, a more common treatment. See the full list of authors and read their research paper at iScience: “Hypothesis-generating proteome perturbation to identify NEU-4438 and acoziborole modes of action in the African Trypanosome.”

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  • Photography for the past and present at San Francisco subway station

    Mills photography professor Catherine Wagner installation “Arc Cycle” was on display at the Yerba Buena/Moscone Subway Station in San Francisco. The work “aims to reflect San Francisco’s past and present.” Professor Wagner was interviewed about the installation in the San Francisco Chronicle Datebook.

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  • Christie Chung speaks to undergraduates at Psychonomic Conference

    Christie Chung spoke at the Advancing Cognitive Research with Undergraduates (ACRU) event at the Psychonomic Conference in Boston, Mass., on November 18, 2022.

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  • Eduardo Sontag wins IFAC Technical Committee Award

    “University Distinguished Professor Eduardo Sontag received the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) Technical Committee Award on Non-Linear Control Systems, which is described as the ‘highest distinction on nonlinear control systems research.'”

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  • Josep Jornet is 2022 IEEE WTC Outstanding Young Researcher

    “Associate Professor Josep Jornet received the 2022 IEEE WTC Outstanding Young Researcher Award for his pioneering contributions to the field of terahertz communications. Jornet’s contributions range from terahertz array architectures and propagation channel models to physical and link layer solutions for ultra-broadband and ultra-directional networks operating at frequencies above 100 GHz. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers and multiple patents.”

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  • ‘Public Investment in Hazard Mitigation: Effectiveness and the Role of Community Diversity’

    In his abstract, professor Ivan Petkov writes, “I estimate the loss-reducing effect of local public investments against natural hazards with new measures of damages, weather risk, and spending for a panel of 904 US coastal counties in 2000-2020. I distinguish federally- and county-funded projects and rely on a quasi-experimental strategy, matching counties by economic development, population, and weather risk. Risk predictions come from the Random Forest learning algorithm, using granular data on resident vulnerability and severe weather frequency.”

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  • Why only ‘six’ degrees of separation?

    This preprint interrogates the concept of “six degrees of separation,” which postulates that, within a social network, no one person is removed from any other by more than six steps. But is this the case? And if so, mathematically, why would this hold true? The authors propose that “six degrees of separation” constitutes the “equilibrium state of any network where individuals weigh between their aspiration to improve their centrality and the costs incurred in forming and maintaining connections.” See the full list of authors and read their research, “Why are there six degrees of separation in a social network?” at…

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  • Therese Pirozzi receives grant for ‘Active Brain, Healthy Brain Exercise Program’

    “Therese Pirozzi, associate professor in Bouvé College’s Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, is a practicing speech-language pathologist with a focus on language and health literacy of low-income families, neuroplasticity of the brain, and the effects of brain injury on survivors and their families. Over the summer, she received a grant for the ‘Active Brain, Healthy Brain Exercise Program’ from the Community Endowment of Lexington—an endowed fund of the Foundation for MetroWest.”

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  • ‘Scaling Laws for Two-Dimensional Dendritic Crystal Growth in a Narrow Channel’

    “We investigate analytically and computationally the dynamics of 2D needle crystal growth from the melt in a narrow channel. Our analytical theory predicts that, in the low supersaturation limit, the growth velocity V decreases in time t as a power law V∼t−2/3, which we validate by phase-field and dendritic-needle-network simulations.” See the full list of authors and read this pre-print at ArXiv.

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  • How personal hardship affects partisan responses to COVID-19 and climate change

    While both the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change issues have been characterized by highly contentious, partisan political responses, this study finds that those partisan responses reduced in the face of personal hardship. They conclude “that partisan messaging can increase polarization and suggest that personal experience can, under some conditions, narrow it.” See the full list of authors and read their research paper, “Personal Hardship Narrows the Partisan Gap in COVID-19 and Climate Change Responses,” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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  • Functional insights into protein signaling

    This review in the journal Life provides “Functional Insights into Protein Kinase A (PKA) Signaling from C. elegans.” PhD. students Fereshteh Sadeghian and Perla Castaneda, along with postdoctoral researcher Mustafi Amin and professor of biology Erin Cram, write that Caenorhabditis elegans, an unsegmented nematode, “provides a powerful genetic platform for understanding how [PKA] can regulate an astounding variety of physiological responses.”

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  • Better diagnoses for visual vergence disorders

    Common vergence disorders, characterized by instability between a subject’s eyes as they try to focus on an object (convergence and divergence), can be diagnosed by examining the horizontal fusional reserves of the eye. This study looks at “Infrared eyetracking technology [which] shows promise for obtaining automated and objective measurements of fusional reserves.” This paper is the result of an international collaboration with the University of Auckland, New Zealand. See the full list of authors and read their research, “Objective estimation of fusional reserves using infrared eye tracking: the digital fusion-range test,” in Clinical and Experimental Optometry.

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  • Record performance on display for named data networking delivery platform

    Electrical and computer engineering professor Edmund Yeh, leading a multi-university project on named data networking for data-intensive science experiments (N-DISE), has “demonstrated a record average throughput of 50 Gbps and peak throughput of 63 Gbps for the N-DISE data delivery platform on a transcontinental wide area network testbed.” The project involves collaborators from Northeastern University, the California Institute of Technology, the University of California Los Angeles, and the Tennessee Technological University. Read more about their demonstrations at the College of Engineering.

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  • Coastal upwelling helps delicate species survive

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    This article is an important addition to our understanding of species abundance and distribution—a subject becoming ever more important with ongoing climate change. For this study, researchers used “wavelet analysis” to examine sixteen intertidal zones along the the coast of Europe. Results show that “upwelling”—a process that brings deep, cold water to the surface—produces refuges for thermally delicate species by mitigating rising temperatures. See the full list of authors and read “Coastal upwelling generates cryptic temperature refugia” in Nature.

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  • Linker wins Ticknor Society Prize for book collecting

    Jessica Linker, assistant professor of history, won the 2022 Ticknor Society Prize for book collecting, which was announced at the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair in November, 2022. Her entry, “Emma Hart Willard: A Life in Print,” examines the nineteenth-century founder of Troy Female Seminary, Emma Hart Willard.

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  • Yongmin Liu elected 2023 Fellow Member of Optica for research in nanophotonics

    “Associate Professor Yongmin Liu was elected as a 2023 Fellow Member of Optica. Fellow membership in Optica is limited to no more than ten percent of the membership and is reserved for members who have served with distinction in the advancement of optics and photonics. Liu is being honored specifically for significant contributions to the fundamental and application of nanophotonics, particularly plasmonics and photonic metamaterials.”

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  • Northeastern researchers win ‘Invented Here!’ contest

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    “This year, the Center for Research Innovation is excited to share that multiple Northeastern researchers have been honored in the annual Invented Here! contest, held by the Boston Patent Law Association (BPLA). Established in 2010 by the BPLA, the Invented Here! contest is meant to celebrate local New England inventors, from their inventions to their own stories. Over 49 inventions and over 170 inventors have been recognized since 2010. These inventors are key to furthering innovation not only in our region, but across the world.”

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  • Student-centered climate work at the Marine Science Center

    Professor of environmental sciences Kristina Faul came from Mills College at Northeastern to visit the Marine Science Center. She delivered a talk on student-centered climate change work in November 2022.

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  • ‘Effect of Dissolved Humic Acids and Coated Humic Acids on Tetracycline Adsorption by K₂CO₃-Activated Magnetic Biochar’

    “Humic acids (HAs) widely exist in water environment, and has an important impact on the adsorption of pollutants. Herein, HAs (both dissolved and coated) was employed to assess the effect on the removal of the organic contaminant tetracycline (TC) by K2CO3 modified magnetic biochar (KMBC). Results showed that low concentration of dissolved HAs promoted TC removal, likely due to a bridging effect, while higher concentration of dissolved HAs inhibited TC adsorption because of the competition of adsorption sites on KMBC.” Find the paper and the full list of authors in Scientific Reports.

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  • Fazelpour becomes Schmidt Futures Early Career Fellow to ‘pursue bold and multidisciplinary research in artificial intelligence’

    The philanthropic Schmidt Futures organization “announced the first cohort of fifteen AI2050 Early Career Fellows who will pursue bold and multidisciplinary research in artificial intelligence (AI) at ten universities and one national laboratory.” Assistant professor of philosophy and computer science Sina Fazelpour has been named one of these fellows. “Fellows are eligible to receive up to $300,000 over two years and will have access to Schmidt Futures’ network of global talent to advance their AI research in fields including computer science, economics, political science, and philosophy,” Schmidt Futures wrote.

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  • Pluralizing research in mental health policy

    David A. Rochefort, arts and sciences distinguished professor of political science, and Jared Hirschfield ’20, have co-authored a book chapter titled “National, State, and Local Mental Health Policy: Meeting the Needs for Research Pluralism and Application of Knowledge” in the recently published “Research Handbook on Mental Health Policy.” See the publisher’s webpage for more information.

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