Young Investigator Award Recipients 2022-2023

YOUNG INVESTIGATOR AWARD RECIPIENTS 2022-2023

Announcing our Young Investigator Award Recipients The College of Engineering at Northeastern University is pleased to announce nine young investigator grants awarded to faculty during the 2022-2023 academic year from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Office of Naval Research, and Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Current Northeastern College of Engineering faculty have received 142 young investigator awards, including 72 NSF CAREER awards and 26 Department of Defense awards. Our dedicated research development team works closely with faculty, providing strategic and tactical support to improve faculty success and impact while growing the research enterprise. In just the last three years, faculty have received 37 federal and professional society young investigator awards. In FY2023, the college received $118 million in external research awards, up 101% from FY2017.

Sara Hashmi NSF CAREER Award, in situ Polymer Gelation in Confined Flows

RESEARCH Polymer gels are all around us in both natural and industrial settings, including gelatin, toothpaste, 3D printing materials—even human blood. Awarded a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, Sara Hashmi, assistant professor of chemical engineering, is conducting research to better understand the fundamental science of how crosslinked polymers flow through small channels to prevent or reverse clogging in various applications such as blood flow through a vessel. For her research, Hashmi is injecting alginate, a naturally occurring polymer, and calcium chloride into a microscopic channel through two separate openings. When they combine, they crosslink, or stick to each other and to the walls of the channel. By manipulating variables, such as the amount of alginate versus calcium chloride or the speed at which they are injected, she is gaining insight into the behavior of these polymers. Hashmi uses her observations to mathematically model the physical processes of these flow patterns.

TEACHING/OUTREACH As part of the CAREER grant, Hashmi is engaging in STEM education opportunities for teachers and students. Working with Northeastern’s Center for STEM Education, she will create a summer workshop to collaborate with Boston Public Schools teachers on publishable curriculum development for high school science classes, including fundamental concepts around complex fluids.

BIOGRAPHY Hashmi’s research focuses on understanding and manipulating the behavior of complex fluids and soft materials flowing through small spaces, using microfluidic tools for biomedical, pharmaceutical, and environmental applications. She joined Northeastern in 2019 and received her PhD from Yale University in 2008.

Sara Hashmi, Assistant Professor, Chemical Engineering Photo by Billie Weiss Northeastern University

Elizabeth Libby NIH Early-Stage Investigator R35 MIRA Grant, The Battle Against Antibiotic Resistance

RESEARCH

Elizabeth Libby Assistant Professor, Bioengineering Photo by Matthew Modoono Northeastern University

As traditional antibiotics lose their effectiveness, many deadly diseases have become more difficult to treat. With an Early Stage Investigator R35 MIRA (Maximizing Investigator’s Research Award) grant from the National Institutes of Health, Elizabeth Libby, assistant professor of bioengineering, is researching how bacteria survive antibiotic treatment by seeking to understand how cells change their physiology and behavior to adapt to a hostile environment at the cellular level.

She is examining an ancient class of signaling systems—the Hanks-type serine/threonine kinases and phosphatases—that determine and regulate cell growth and behavior, including susceptibility to common antibiotics such as penicillin and cephalosporins. These signaling systems are key contributors to the failure of antibiotic treatment in major diseases. If researchers can understand how a bacterial cell learns that it’s about to be attacked by a powerful antibiotic, they might be able to turn off that signal so the attack can be successful. Libby is using an innovative synthetic biology approach, engineering new protein-based sensors that will help her track and control a cell’s response to its environment.

BIOGRAPHY Libby’s research focuses on synthetic biology, microbiology, and biosensor development.

Through an interdisciplinary approach encompassing protein engineering, microbial genetics, and systems biology, she uses a combination of synthetic biology and microbiology to build new, predictably performing biological systems. The systems are used for a variety of applications such as revealing new biology and engineering new types of biosensors. Libby joined Northeastern in 2021 and received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011.

Samuel Muñoz NSF CAREER Award, Improving Flood Hazard Assessments

RESEARCH Used to determine the likelihood of flooding in a particular area, flood hazard assessments rely chiefly on recorded historical data, which seldom cover more than a few decades and provide a very limited view of a river’s past—and potential future—activity. With a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, Samuel Muñoz, associate professor of marine and environmental sciences, jointly appointed in civil and environmental engineering, aims to enhance understanding of rivers and their behavior by combining systematic, long-term observations with hydraulic model simulations to create more accurate flood hazard assessments. The insights developed will help generate high-quality paleoflood estimates, along with workflows and toolsets that could transform our ability to reconstruct prehistoric floods on lowland river systems.

TEACHING/OUTREACH One of the reasons Muñoz chose the Merrimack River for his floodplain observatory is that a community college, New Hampshire Technological Institute (NHTI), sits beside it, among the oxbow lakes he intends to study. Muñoz plans to enlist the help of NHTI students in the operation of the observatory, providing opportunities for capstone projects and practical experience with instrumentation and computational techniques. He also foresees additional student opportunities related to the study via internships at Northeastern and a K-12 outreach program that introduces youth to local habitats and the tools and methods that scientists use to study the environment.

BIOGRAPHY Muñoz focuses on sedimentary records of environmental change, paleoclimate and climate change, rivers and fluvial processes, and hydroclimatic extremes. His Earth Surface Systems Lab studies hydrologic and climatic variability and its connections to the natural and built environment. He is the principal investigator for several NSF grants examining the accumulation of microplastics in the environment, climate effects on the Mississippi River, and coastal storm and flood modeling. He joined Northeastern in 2017 and received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 2015.

Samuel Muñoz, Associate Professor, Marine and Environmental Sciences, jointly appointed in Civil and Environmental Engineering Photo by Matthew Modoono Northeastern University

Francesco Restuccia Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program Award Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program Award

RESEARCH Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program Award: Polymorphic Wireless Computing for Ultra-Wideband 6G Spectrum Dominance Francesco Restuccia, Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering Photo by Matthew Modoono, Northeastern University

To make 6G a reality, Francesco Restuccia, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, is focused on finding the right tradeoff between communication needs and the computational capabilities of wireless devices. He is using advanced concepts in neural network design to enable real-time and autonomous modification of wireless communication networks based on user and device needs. For example, if a user is completing a task that requires more data, the network would self-adapt to increase the computational speed. To accomplish this, Restuccia is researching novel techniques that will seamlessly adapt not only the underlying algorithmic structure, but also the hardware and software components of 6G wireless devices, while operating at several gigahertz of bandwidth.

Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program Award: Establishing Theoretical Foundations of Next-Generation Dynamic Data-Driven Wireless Systems To ensure that wireless networks function accurately and reliably, even if they become congested or compromised, Restuccia is exploring new ways to enable complex real-time wireless transmissions within a cyber-physical system. His research is optimizing the cyber portion of these networks mathematically by creating multiple logical networks on shared physical infrastructure and applying application-level semantic optimization to the problem. Using network slicing and semantic approaches, and taking into account changing spectrum conditions, Restuccia aims to dynamically compress sensed data to minimize demand on the network, while ensuring that application demands are satisfied. He is also focused on making sure that artificial intelligence/ machine learning algorithms can reliably comply with the constantly shifting limitations of a network and the similarly changeable demands of an application by adapting the AI/ML models in real time, almost continuously, and certifying the performance.

BIOGRAPHY Restuccia’s research focuses on next-generation wireless communications, artificial intelligence, embedded systems, and wireless security. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and received the 2019 Mario Gerla Award in Computer Science. Restuccia joined Northeastern in 2017 and received his PhD from Missouri University of Science and Technology in 2016.

Benjamin Woolston NIH R21 Trailblazer Award, Engineering Smarter Gut Metabolites

RESEARCH With a Trailblazer Award for New and Early Stage Investigators from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, Benjamin Woolston, assistant professor of chemical engineering, is leading interdisciplinary work to look for ways to use human gut microbes as potential therapies against disease. The research aims to learn what factors exist in the complex gut that engineers need to consider to develop microbes that can react intelligently to the environment in the gut microbiome. Microbes could be programmed to dynamically sense and respond to the level of a target metabolite in their local environment, restoring the desired level by either degrading the compound or producing more of it. Woolston and his team are concentrating on microbially produced hydrogen sulfide (H2S), which has been linked to health issues such as ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease. They hope that the lessons learned from this research developing the H2S-controlling microbes can be used in the future for different metabolites involved in other diseases, as well as provide some valuable basic science about the gut microbiome and how it behaves.

BIOGRAPHY Woolston’s research focuses on metabolic engineering and synthetic biology for sustainable biochemical production and human health. He has been recognized with an International Metabolic Engineering Society Jay Bailey Young Investigator Award in Metabolic Engineering, 2020; and Biotechnology & Bioengineering’s Daniel I.C. Wang Award, 2021. Woolston joined Northeastern in 2020 and received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017.

Benjamin Woolston, Assistant Professor, Bioengineering Photo by Bella Martinez Northeastern University

Xiaolin Xu NSF CAREER Award, Enhancing the Security of Machine Learning Hardware Accelerators

RESEARCH

Xiaolin Xu, Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering Photo by Bella Martinez, Northeastern University

With machine learning being used in modalities from image recognition to self-driving cars, researchers are seeking ways to make these technologies even faster. In many cases, hardware can be used to increase the speed and efficiency of machine learning, but along with this solution comes inherent security risks. With a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, Xiaolin Xu, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, seeks to mitigate the security risks by systematically investigating the threats and defenses of Field Programmable Gate Array-based Machine Learning (FPGA-ML) acceleration systems so performance can increase without compromising safety. The research will adopt the role of attacker and defender.

It will focus on run-time FPGA-ML integrity and design-time FPGA-ML confidentiality. Additionally, the research will characterize vulnerability root causes and explore systematic defense strategies at the circuit- and system-level to suit different application scenarios.

TEACHING/OUTREACH The educational component of the research grant will benefit high school through graduate students and beyond. An interactive modular learning system will help high school students stack knowledge, from coding with Python through hardware security fundamentals.

College students will be recruited to participate in the research project, including those from Northeastern’s Summer Bridge Program. To further broaden knowledge and cultivate interest, Xu will host panels and workshops to share the cross-domain knowledge learned and complement the broader AI-enabled cyberspace

BIOGRAPHY Xu’s research interests include hardware security, machine learning, AI security, energy-efficient deep learning, computer architecture, embedded systems, and VLSI. In addition to this CAREER Award, he is principal investigator of four active grants from the National Science Foundation, including two recent $1.2 million awards in the areas of AI and security. Xu joined Northeastern in 2020 and received his PhD from University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2016.

Sze Zheng Yong Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program Award, Enabling Navy Ships to Function Autonomously

RESEARCH Sze Zheng Yong, associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, is creating the complex algorithms needed for autonomous robots and Navy ships to design “informationbearing motions” for enhanced nonverbal communication. His work will also enable other robot teammates to decode the information from these motions with limited or no communication.

The goal is to make it possible for unmanned ships to function autonomously in teams and adapt to the unexpected when there is no central command. This is particularly significant in situations where GPS and other forms of communication are spotty or nonexistent. It is also important to make these information-bearing movements subtle, so they are not easily intercepted and decoded by adversaries. Yong’s innovation will help make it possible for autonomous ships to protect seaports, monitor enemy activity, transport cargo, conduct dangerous rescue operations, and disrupt enemy activity—all without endangering the lives of military personnel.

BIOGRAPHY Yong’s research focuses on the control, estimation, identification, and analysis of autonomous, robotic, and cyber-physical systems. He has been recognized with a NASA Early Career Faculty Award, 2020; NSF CAREER Award, 2020; and DARPA Young Faculty Award, 2018. Yong joined Northeastern in 2022 and received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016.

Sze Zheng Yong, Associate Professor, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Photo by Bella Martinez, Northeastern University

Xufeng Zhang Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program Award, Cryogenically Enabled Ultrabroadband THz System-on-a-Chip RESEARCH

Xufeng Zhang, Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering Photo by Bella Martinez Northeastern University

Xufeng Zhang, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, is researching ways to take advantage of recent advancements in silicon photonics, superconducting devices, and terahertz (THz) instrumentation to develop a novel terahertz (THz) system-on-a-chip (SOC).

Because of their unique properties, THz waves have been long recognized for their potentials to open new areas of the electromagnetic spectrum for high-speed, high-throughput wireless communication and sensing. However, technical challenges have made it difficult to fully exploit this frequency band; existing THz systems are usually cumbersome, expensive, and, in some cases, have unsatisfying performance. Zhang’s SOC represents a critical and indispensable step towards solving these challenges, and has the potential to reshape the future of THz research. With its comprehensive on-chip signal processing capabilities, including THz generation, routing, manipulation, and detection, such novel THz SOCs will be suitable for a broad range of practical applications, including quantum networks and wireless communication for 6G and 7G networks.

BIOGRAPHY Zhang has diverse research interests in device physics and applications, with a main focus on experimental study of spin wave dynamics and magnonic devices hybridized with microwave, photonics, and mechanics for coherent and quantum information processing. He co-authored a paper published in Nature on quantum bit platforms; his key contribution in quantum microwave measurements helped demonstrate a fundamentally new quantum bit (qubit) platform in which a single electron is trapped on a substrate of neon frozen to near absolute zero. The insights gained point to new directions in low-cost, large-scale quantum computers. Zhang joined Northeastern in 2022 from Argonne National Lab. He received his PhD from Yale University in 2016.

With over 230 tenured/tenure-track faculty and 18 multidisciplinary research centers and institutes with funding by eight federal agencies, the College of Engineering is a leader in experiential education and interdisciplinary research focused on discovering solutions to global challenges to benefit society. Northeastern’s global university system—with engineering programs on campuses across the U.S. and in multiple countries—provides flexible academic offerings, innovative partnerships, and the ability to scale ideas, talent, and solutions.

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