Dear Colleagues,
We are pleased to bring you another edition of the College of Engineering’s Research Focus newsletter. Highlighted are striking research achievements made during the past few months. Through the Summer Research Discussions, there have been numerous exciting research discussions, bringing together faculty across departments, colleges, and disciplines to explore new and ambitious projects on the microbiome, multi-model data fusion, robotics, the Internet of Things, and the networked digital earth, as well as specific programs like EFRI and EFRCs. We thank those who have led and participated in these efforts and are excited to see the results of the discussions.
The 2016 journal publication and conference listings are now posted on the COE website for each department. Of the 564 journal articles, 25 articles were published in a top-ranked publication, including Nature (Purnima Ratilal-Makris), the Journal of the American Chemical Society (Hicham Fenniri), Advanced Materials (Hongli Zhu, Nian Sun, and Nasim Annabi), and Chemical Reviews (Hongli Zhu). We are proud to have so many of you sharing your work and findings in these peer-reviewed outlets, which will not only further the Northeastern name, but also provide a significant impact on the science community.
Looking ahead to the rapidly approaching fall quarter, there will be sessions offered on topics such as planning for an ERC as well as multiple onboarding and refresher sessions about research support. We hope that you will find these sessions impactful and beneficial to your research endeavors. As always, please reach out if you have any suggestions or requests on how the research development team may better support your ambitions.
Nadine Aubry & Akram Alshawabkeh
COE Dean Associate Dean for Research
Selected Research Highlights
Renewal of CyberCorps® Scholarship for Service
Professors Agnes Chan (CCIS) and David Kaeli (ECE) were awarded a $4.6M NSF grant to continue and expand its participation in the CyberCorps® Scholarship for Service (SFS) program.
Gu Selected as WEF Fellow
CEE Professor April Gu has been selected as a Water Environment Federation Fellow, for her professional achievement, stature and contributions to the preservation and enhancement of the global water environment.
Chowdhury Awarded $200K NSF Grant
ECE Associate Professor Kaushik Chowdhury was awarded a $200K NSF grant for "DeepBeam: Wirelessly chargeable portable batteries through energy beamforming."
Ioannidis Leads Back-to-Back NSF Grants
ECE Assistant Professor Stratis Ioannidis and Professor Miriam Leeser have been awarded a $500K NSF grant to create a "Massively Scalable Secure Computation Infrastructure Using FPGAs." Ioannidis and Professor Edmund Yeh were awarded a $500K NSF grant for "Caching Networks with Optimality Guarantees."
Shefelbine Awarded $650K NSF Grant
MIE/BioE Associate Professor Sandra Shefelbine has been awarded a $650K NSF "Mechanobiology of Joint Morphogenesis: Manipulating Salamander Limbs" grant to study joint development by examining the regenerating limbs of salamanders.
Lewis Wins Fulbright Award to Advance Magnetic Materials Research
ChE/MIE Professor Laura Lewis has won a Fulbright Award in Spain to advance her research in magnetic materials.
Patterson, Fernandez, & Helmuth Awarded $300K NSF Grant
COS/CEE Professor Mark Patterson, CEE/COS Assistant Professor Loretta Fernandez, and CEE affiliated Professor Brian Helmuth from COS were awarded a $300K NSF grant for "Tide gate modulation of wetland function: decision support through engineering best practices."
Interdisciplinary Research Leads to Next-Generation Dressing for Chronic Non-healing Wounds
Inspired by a passion for translating research into products that can improve healthcare, ChE Assistant Professor Nasim Annabi undertook an interdisciplinary approach to solve the problem of chronic wounds.
$350K NSF Grant to Explore Mechanics of Fusion
MIE Professors Kai-Tak Wan and Sinan Muftu were awarded a $350K NSF grant to explore the "Mechanics of fusion of dissimilar lipid bilayers and multi-lamellar vesicles."
Professor Fu Awarded Army Research Office Award for $390K
ECE/CCIS Professor Yun Raymond Fu was awarded a three-year, $390K award from the Army Research Office for his “Images Assisted Video Recognition by Heterogeneous Knowledge Transfer” proposal.
Jung Awarded $200K NSF Grant
MIE Professor Yung Joon Jung was awarded a $200K NSF grant for "Design and Development of High-performance Miniature Radiation Detectors using Ultrasensitive Graphene and Carbon Nanotube ion Sensors."
Cipolla Elected Honorary Member of the ASME
COE Distinguished Professor Emeritus John W. Cipolla has been elected an honorary member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).
Yeh Leads $1M NSF Award to Redesign World’s Largest Big Data Network
ECE Professor Edmund Yeh was recently awarded a $1M NSF grant entitled “CC* Integration: SANDIE: Software Defined Network-Assisted Named Data Network for Data Intensive Experiments.”
Protecting Privacy for Wireless Medical Devices
ECE affiliated Professor Guevara Noubir from CCIS and ECE Associate Professor Kaushik Chowdhury were awarded a $300K NSF grant for "Assessing and Protecting Privacy in Wireless Wearable Sensor-Generated Medical Data."
Geolocation LocATER System for First Responders
ECE Associate Professor Taskin Padir was awarded a $200K NSF grant to design "LocATER: Localization and Accountability Technology for Emergency Responders."
Benneyan Receives NSF EAGER Grant
MIE Professor James Benneyan was awarded a $257K NSF EAGER grant for "Development and Validation of Analytic Spatial-Temporal Models to Help Study and Mitigate the National Opioid-Heroin Co-Epidemic."
Professors Leeser and Kokar to Work on DARPA Project with BAE Systems
ECE Professors Mitch Kokar and Miriam Leeser will work with BAE Systems on DARPA’s CONverged Collaborative Elements for RF Task Operations (CONCERTO) program.
