
Massachusetts farmers turn food waste into electricity
by Amanda Ventura
In an effort to reduce food waste, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection prohibited…
Through a competitive review process, the Global Resilience Institute has awarded seed-funding to teams of Northeastern faculty, for resilience-related research collaborations. This funding supports innovative, collaborative cross-college research proposals.
Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Northeastern University & Director, Sustainability & Data Sciences Laboratory (SDS Lab)
617.373.6005
Auroop R. Ganguly directs the Sustainability & Data Sciences Laboratory (SDS Lab) at Northeastern University, where his research encompasses weather extremes, water sustainability and marine or urban ecology under climate change as well as the resilience of critical infrastructures and lifelines under natural or man-made hazards. He has developed and adapted computational solutions, especially in so-called "Big Data", to solve problems in sustainability, security and business. His research in climate, hydrology and ecology has been accepted and published in interdisciplinary journals such as Nature, Nature Climate Change, PNAS, Scientific Reports, as well as the top disciplinary journals in hydrology, geophysics, and climate, and highlighted by scientific venues and by the national and international media. He has published and received best papers awards in top peer-reviewed computer science conferences or journals in the area of data mining and machine learning, as well as network sciences. In addition, he has published in information technology and sciences, with a particular focus on business intelligence and the supply chain. He has edited books on Knowledge Discovery from Sensor Data and has contributed to editorial, committee and workshop organizational service in civil engineering, geophysics, meteorology, operational research, electrical engineering and computer science societies. He has collaborated and published with a wide set of interdisciplinary researchers including in atmospheric and marine sciences, computer and network sciences, statistics, management sciences as well as law, economics and policy.
Prior to joining Northeastern University in Fall 2011, he had 7 years experience at the US DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, most recently as a Senior Scientist, in their Computational Sciences and Engineering division and the Climate Change Science Initiative in areas such as climate change, weather extremes, hydrology, geographic information science, critical infrastructures risk, sensor data mining, transportation and homeland security and defense. He was employed in product development and senior product management roles for about 5 years at Oracle Corporation in their time series database group and then in their supply chain e-business applications suite, followed by about a year at a startup, which in turn was subsequently acquired by Oracle Corporation. Ganguly has taught undergraduate courses in probability, engineering economy and climate change science and policy, in addition to graduate courses in applied time series and spatial statistics, critical infrastructures resilience and water resources, across three universities, namely, Northeastern University as a full time faculty, as well as Tennessee Knoxville and South Florida in joint faculty or visiting faculty roles, over the last 12 years.
Distinguished Professor of Supply Chain Management
617.373.7198
Dr. Sanders is an internationally recognized expert in forecasting, predictive analytics, risk management, and supply chain management. Her research includes identifying best practices in forecasting, developing a corporate technology strategy, and creating a resilient supply chain. Her teaching includes advanced supply chain management problems, supply chain strategy, supply chain analytics, and forecasting. She has taught at a wide range of academic levels, primarily at the MBA and Executive MBA levels, and has designed multiple successful MBA programs.
Dr. Sanders has held a range of leadership roles in both academic and professional organizations and has served on numerous Executive Boards. She has provided training and consulting to a range of Fortune 500 companies, including IDG, Nike, AT&T, CIBA Corning, Mattel, MTC Corp., Dell, and many others. She is a frequently called upon keynote speaker and expert witness having worked with firms such as Jones Day; Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease; Quinn, Emanuel, Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP and others.
Professor of the Practice Interdisciplinary with Bouvé College of Health Sciences
617.373.2354
Professor Pavel holds a joint faculty appointment in the College of Computer & Information Science and Bouvé College of Health Sciences. His background comprises electrical engineering, computer science and experimental psychology, and his research is focused on multiscale computational modeling of behaviors and their control, with applications ranging from elder care to augmentation of human performance. Professor Pavel is using these model-based approaches to develop algorithms transforming unobtrusive monitoring from smart homes and mobile devices to useful and actionable knowledge for diagnosis and intervention. Under the auspices of the Northeastern-based Consortium on Technology for Proactive Care, Professor Pavel and his colleagues are targeting technological innovations to support the development of economically feasible, proactive, distributed, and individual-centered healthcare. Previously, Professor Pavel was the director of the Smart and Connected Health Program at the National Science Foundation, a program co-sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. Earlier, he served as the chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Oregon Health & Science University, a Technology Leader at AT&T Laboratories, a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories, and faculty member at Stanford University and New York University.
Teaching Professor
Lead faculty for Geospatial Services (GS) in the graduate program at the College of Professional Studies. I completed my Ph.D. at UCL; continued as a postdoc at the (then named) Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge MA; as a Junior Scientist at the German Aerospace Center in Berlin, Germany; and Boston University’s Center for Remote Sensing, where I worked as a Research Associate Professor for over 10 years. My research centered on issues of water scarcity and water security in the MENA region using geospatial innovation. I joined Northeastern full time in Jan 2007, continuing this research alongside 2 Fulbright scholars. Current research focuses on geospatial intelligence and multidisciplinary geospatial, particularly deriving actionable insights from big geospatial datasets to support community resilience in response to complex challenges. In 2014 and 2015, I earned USGIF accreditation and the NGA-USGS Geospatial Center of Excellence Designation for the GS program.
Professor of Public Policy
Director, Master of Public Policy and Master of Public Administration Programs
617.373.4398
Christopher Bosso is professor of public policy at Northeastern University. His areas of interest include food and environmental policy, science and technology policy, and the governance of emerging technologies. His newest books are Framing the Farm Bill: Interests, Ideology, and the Agricultural Act of 2014 (University of Kansas Press, 2017) and, as editor, Feeding Cities: Improving Local Food Access, Sustainability, and Resilience (Routledge, 2017).
His 2005 book, Environment, Inc.: From Grassroots to Beltway, received the 2006 Caldwell Award for best book in environmental policy and politics from the American Political Science Association. He is also coordinator of the Consortium on Food Systems Sustainability, Health and Equity, as well as advisor to students in the accompanying undergraduate minor.
Associate Professor of Political Science
617.373.2796
Max Abrahms is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute and Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Northeastern University. His research focuses on international security, especially terrorism. Abrahms has published on terrorism in International Security, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of International Business Policy, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other scholarly, policy, and popular outlets. He is the author of Rules for Rebels: The Science of Victory in Militant History (2018), a book that enables readers to predict the behavior of militant groups from their target selection to social media strategy, even their odds of political success. Abrahms has held fellowships and other affiliations with the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, the Empirical Studies of Conflict project at Princeton University, the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College, the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University, the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, the political science department at Johns Hopkins University, the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, and the Belfer Center at Harvard. Abrahms frequently consults U.S. government agencies on the contemporary terrorism landscape.
Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northeastern University
617.373.5400
Edmund Yeh received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering with Distinction and Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University in 1994. He then studied at Cambridge University on the Winston Churchill Scholarship, obtaining his M.Phil in Engineering in 1995. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT under Professor Robert Gallager in 2001. He is currently Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University. He was previously Assistant and Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Statistics at Yale University.
Professor Yeh has held visiting positions at MIT, Princeton, University of California at Berkeley, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), and Technical University of Munich. He has been on the technical staff at the Mathematical Sciences Research Center, Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, Signal Processing Research Department, AT&T Bell Laboratories, and Space and Communications Group, Hughes Electronics Corporation. Professor Yeh is the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship, the Army Research Office Young Investigator Award, the Winston Churchill Scholarship, the National Science Foundation and Office of Naval Research Graduate Fellowships, the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, the Frederick Emmons Terman Engineering Scholastic Award, and the President’s Award for Academic Excellence (Stanford University). He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. He received Best Paper Awards at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), London, UK, June 2015, and at the IEEE International Conference on Ubiquitous and Future Networks (ICUFN), Phuket, Thailand, July 2012.
Professor Yeh has served as the Secretary of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society. He serves as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering.
Assistant Professor, College of Computer and Information Science
617.373.7021
Dr. Yu is an Assistant Professor in the College of Computer and Information Science. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher in Caltech Computing and Mathematical Sciences. She earned her PhD in Computer Sciences at the University of Southern California and was a visiting researcher at Stanford University.
Her research focuses on developing machine learning techniques for large-scale time series and spatiotemporal data. She is generally interested in the theory and applications of sequential decision making, optimization, and spatiotemporal modeling. Her work has been successfully applied to intelligent transportation, climate informatics, and social media anomaly detection. Among her awards, she was nominated as one of the 2015 “MIT Rising Stars in EECS”.
Professor Breckenridge specializes in environmental and natural resources law. She began her career as an attorney with the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC, where she worked on some of the agency's initial regulatory efforts to implement the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. Professor Breckenridge continued her environmental work as an assistant attorney general with the state of Tennessee and the commonwealth of Massachusetts. She served as a law clerk for Judge Gilbert S. Merritt on the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in 1977-1978.
Before joining the faculty of the School of Law, Professor Breckenridge was chief of the Environmental Protection Division for the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office, where she was engaged in a wide range of litigation to enforce the requirements of federal and state air and water pollution statutes, hazardous waste management requirements, and wetlands and tidelands protection laws.
At Northeastern, Professor Breckenridge teaches courses in environmental law, wildlife and ecosystems law, land use zoning and planning law, and property. She also works with students on independent study projects focusing on a variety of related topics, such as urban environmental justice, affordable housing and federal lands management. In her research and advocacy work, she has a particular interest in aquatic ecosystems and in the evolution of property and regulatory systems to manage conflicts over water flow and quality. As a member of the board of directors of the Charles River Watershed Association and a participant in other government task forces, she has advocated for new policies and regulations to manage urban infrastructure and land uses in order to maintain adequate water quality and instream water flows in rivers and streams.
Professor Enrich is a leading authority on state and local government and state tax policy, and frequently serves as an advisor to state and local governments and to advocacy groups interested in state and local fiscal policy. He teaches Contracts, State and Local Government and State and Local Taxation. His areas of research and expertise include state taxation of businesses, tax equity, relationships between different levels of government and funding of public education.
In his seminal 1996 Harvard Law Review article, “Saving the States from Themselves: Commerce Clause Constraints on State Tax Incentives for Business,” Professor Enrich argued that a ubiquitous element of state economic policy — tax breaks to reward large corporations for locating investment in the jurisdiction — not only are poor public policy but also frequently violate the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. Since the article was published, Professor Enrich has consistently been in demand as one of the nation’s foremost experts in this field. Working together with consumer activist Ralph Nader, he pursued pathbreaking litigation challenging the constitutionality of state tax giveaways used to compete for businesses. After achieving a victory in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, Professor Enrich argued the case before the US Supreme Court in 2006. The high court overturned the Sixth Circuit's ruling on procedural grounds, without reaching the constitutional merits.
Professor Enrich was general counsel to the Massachusetts Executive Office for Administration and Finance before joining the law school's faculty. Following law school, Professor Enrich clerked for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer during his tenure on the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. He also served two terms as an elected selectman in Lexington, Massachusetts, and he continues to play an active role in Massachusetts progressive politics and policy advocacy. Prior to his legal career, Professor Enrich was a doctoral student and instructor of philosophy at Princeton University, and an instructor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, specializing in epistemology and social theory.
Lead Faculty, Behavioral Science Associate Teaching Professor, College of Professional Studies, Northeastern University
617.435.9206
Dr. Kristen Lee, Ed.D., LICSW is an internationally recognized, award-winning behavioral science professor, clinician and author from Boston, Massachusetts.
As the Lead Faculty for Behavioral Science at Northeastern University, Dr. Kris’s research and teaching interests include individual and organizational well-being and resilience, particularly for marginalized and underserved populations. She is the author of RESET: Make the Most of Your Stress, Winner of the Next Generation Indie Book Awards Motivational Book of 2015, and Mentalligence: A New Psychology of Thinking. She is a regular contributor for Psychology Today. Dr. Lee’s work has been featured on NPR and CBS radio.
Dr. Lee is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker known for her advocacy in promoting increased mental health integration in social policies and institutions to facilitate access and improved health outcomes in the U.S. and across the globe. She has served at as a U.S. federal grant reviewer for the Departments of Minority Affairs, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration, and Health and Human Services. She is a member of the National Association of Social Workers and the American Psychological Association. She holds a BS from Worcester State University, MSW from Boston University and an Ed.D. from Northeastern University. In 2011, Dr. Lee was the recipient of an Excellence in Teaching Award from Northeastern University for her “depth of knowledge” and “engaging teaching style”. In 2015, she was honored with the Distinguished Professional Achievement Award from Worcester State University as “a leader who lives by the highest intellectual and ethical standards”.
Associate Professor, Marine and Environmental Sciences
Prof. Hughes is interested in understanding the causes and consequences of biodiversity within and across species. She focuses on marine and estuarine systems because of the strong experimental tradition in these systems and the important ecosystem services they provide to humans. The incredible productivity of marine ecosystems and our increasing impact and reliance on them makes marine ecology an ideal field for addressing questions of concern to basic and applied science.
Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs
Professor Denise Garcia is associate professor in the Department of Political Science and the International Affairs Program at Northeastern University in Boston and a Nobel Peace Institute Fellow. She researches on international law, and the questions of lethal robotics and artificial intelligence, global governance of security, and the formation of new international norms and their impact on peace and security.
She was the recipient of Northeastern’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities Outstanding Teaching Award in 2016. In 2017, Garcia was appointed to the International Panel for the Regulation of Autonomous Weapons (Germany’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs).
Garcia teaches the annual course titled “Global Governance of International Security and the World Politics of Diplomacy” at the United Nations in Geneva, in cooperation with the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research and many other partners. In 2016, she testified to the United Nations on the question of lethal autonomous weapons and their impact on peace and security.
Author of Small Arms and Security – New Emerging International Norms, and Disarmament Diplomacy and Human Security – Norms, Regimes, and Moral Progress in International Relations, her articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, the European Journal of International Security, International Affairs, Ethics & International Affairs, Third World Quarterly, Global Policy Journal, International Relations, and elsewhere.
She is proud to have held the title of Sadeleer Family Research Faculty at Northeastern (2011-2016). Prior to joining the faculty of Northeastern University in 2006 (tenured in 2013), Garcia held a three-year appointment at Harvard, at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and the World Peace Foundation’s Intra-State Conflict Program. She holds a Ph.D. in international relations and international law from Institut des Hautes Études Internationales et du Développement (Graduate Institute for International Studies and Development), University of Geneva, Switzerland. She is the vice-chair of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, a member of the Academic Council of the United Nations and the Global South Unit for Mediation in Rio de Janeiro. A native of Brazil, and a naturalized citizen of the United States of America, Garcia is a devoted yogi, her hobbies include travel and surfing.
College Distinguished Professor, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Northeastern University
617.373.2382
Dr. Sanjeev Mukerjee is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology (Northeastern University); where he has been since September of 1998. He also heads the newly created center for Renewable Energy Technology at Northeastern University and its subset the Laboratory for Electrochemical Advanced Power (LEAP). This center aims at enhancing education and research on all aspects of renewable energy and green chemistry with special emphasis on selective charge transfer at electrochemical and photo-electrochemical interfaces.
His research on charge transfer dynamics at both two- and three-dimensional electrochemical interfaces encompasses materials development, in situ synchrotron spectroscopy and electro-analytical methods. In addition, new computational initiatives are in progress involving both molecular modeling and simulation of multiple electron scattering in the context of in situ synchrotron XANES method. Peer reviewed publication currently number 150, with an H-factor of 59.
The current projects in the group include materials development for new electrocatalysts, polymer electrolyte membranes and high energy density (and capacity) cathode materials for aqueous and non-aqueous storage cells. Fundamental understanding of structure property relationships is in concert with applications. Among the seminal contributions are, the first demonstration of the power of true element specific in situ x-ray methods for understanding electrocatalysis and intercalation using synchrotron techniques of x-ray scattering and absorption.
Director of CSSH Programs at Northeastern University-Seattle
Director of the Northwest Regional Technology Center for Homeland Security at PNNL
Ann Lesperance has more than 30 years of experience as a researcher and project manager in domestic and international fields including environmental and public health analysis, disaster management, and recovery from natural and man-made events. She is Director of CSSH Programs in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) Director of the Northwest Regional Technology Center for Homeland Security located in Seattle, Washington.
Ann works extensively with federal, state, and local emergency managers and public safety officials on technical and policy issues with an emphasis on terrorist activities, biological events, port security, and critical infrastructure protection. She advocates a bottoms-up approach to public safety and disaster management, focusing first on the local level then linking the state and federal levels to ensure meaningful preparedness, response, recovery, and resilience actions are defined.
Professor - Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences & School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs
781.581.7370 x 307
My research explores the effects of climate and climate change on the physiology and ecology of marine organisms. Specifically, I use thermal engineering techniques, including a combination of field work, remote sensing and mathematical modeling, to explore the ways in which the environment determines the body temperatures of coastal marine animals such as mussels and seastars. Combined with energetics models, this approach provides a quantitative method of mapping patterns of growth, reproduction, and survival in economically and ecologically important coastal species. A major goal of this approach (funded by NASA and NSF) is to inform decision makers with scientifically accurate and useful forecasts. While much of my work has focused on North American rocky intertidal ecosystems, my lab also collaborates with researchers in:
Adelaide, Australia
Melbourne, Australia
Chile
Hong Kong
Italy
South Africa
the U.K.
Our work has shown some surprising results, and has suggested that our expectations of where to look for the effects of climate change in nature can be more complex than previously anticipated. For example, our research has shown that along the Pacific coast of the U.S., animal temperatures at sites in Oregon and Washington can be as hot or hotter than sites much farther to the south in California, due to the complex interaction of climate and tides in the region. As a result, we should not necessarily expect to see mortality at the southern ends of species range boundaries, but also at these hot spots. This complexity suggests that unless we know where and when to look for impacts of climate change, many early impacts could go unnoticed.
My lab group regularly includes K-12 teachers in our research, and I am actively involved in the ongoing National Climate Assessment
Assistant Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and Landscape
Sara Jensen Carr is an Assistant Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and Landscape in the School of Architecture. She teaches design studios and seminars focused on articulating the connections between urban landscapes, ecological resilience, and health equity. Her research also examines the overlaps between the public realm and public health. Recent publications include articles for Preventive Medicine and LA+ Journal, the University of Pennsylvania Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture. She also served as co-chair for a special joint conference for the Association for the Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) and the Association for Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH) entitled Building for Health and Well-Being: Structures Cities Systems.
Sara is a licensed architect and also holds degrees in landscape architecture and environmental planning, and has worked professionally in New Orleans and the San Francisco Bay Area. She was a Piero Patri Urban Design Fellow at San Francisco Planning and Urban Research, and a Mellon Fellow in Urban Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC.
Prior to arriving at Northeastern, she held a joint appointment in the School of Architecture and Office of Public Health Studies at University of Hawai'i at Manoa, where she worked with several local nonprofits and agencies on evaluation and design initiatives, including the Hawai'i Department of Health, the Native Hawaiian Health Program at Queens Medical Center, and the Outrigger Duke Kahanamoku Foundation. She is also an advisory board member at Design 4 Active Sacramento, a cross-sector, award-winning team that advocates for and advises on active design initiatives.
Assistant Professor, Journalism
Jeff Howe is an assistant professor at Northeastern University. A longtime contributing editor at Wired magazine, he coined the term crowdsourcing in a 2006 article for that magazine. In 2008 he published a book with Random House that looked more deeply at the phenomenon of massive online collaboration. Called Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, it has been translated into ten languages. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University during the 2009-2010 academic year, and is currently a visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab, where he is working on a book with Joi Ito, the director of the Media Lab. He has written for the Washington Post, Newyorker.com, The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, and many other publications. He currently lives in Cambridge with his wife and two children. He is co-author of Whiplash, How to Survive Our Faster Future.
Professor & Associate Dean of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity
Tracy Robinson-Wood is a professor in the Department of Applied Psychology at Northeastern University. She is author of The Convergence of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender: Multiple Identities in Counseling. The fifth edition, to be published by SAGE, is anticipated in 2016. Her research interests focus on the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class in psychosocial identity development. She has developed the Resistance Modality Inventory (RMI), a psychometrically valid measure of psychological resistance based upon a theory of resistance she co-developed for black girls and women to optimally push back against racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of oppression. Her research is also focused on parents' racial socialization messages within interracial families, and the relational, psychological, and physiological impact of microaggressions on highly educated racial, gender, and sexual minorities. Prior to Northeastern University, Dr. Robinson-Wood was a professor in the Department of Counselor Education at North Carolina State University. A California native, Dr. Robinson-Wood earned her undergraduate degree in Psychology and Communication from Azusa Pacific University in Azusa, CA. Her graduate degrees are in Human Development and Psychology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She and her husband are proud parents of twin daughters.
Associate Professor, Computer Science
617.373.6475
Tina Eliassi-Rad is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University in Boston, MA. She is also on the faculty of Northeastern's Network Science Institute. Prior to joining Northeastern, Tina was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University; and before that she was a Member of Technical Staff and Principal Investigator at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Tina earned her Ph.D. in Computer Sciences (with a minor in Mathematical Statistics) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research is rooted in data mining and machine learning; and spans theory, algorithms, and applications of massive data from networked representations of physical and social phenomena. Tina's work has been applied to personalized search on the World-Wide Web, statistical indices of large-scale scientific simulation data, fraud detection, mobile ad targeting, and cyber situational awareness. Her algorithms have been incorporated into systems used by the government and industry (e.g., IBM System G Graph Analytics) as well as open-source software (e.g., Stanford Network Analysis Project). In 2010, she received an Outstanding Mentor Award from the Office of Science at the US Department of Energy. For more details, visit http://eliassi.org.
Assistant Professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering
617.373.7193
Michael Kane joined the Civl & Environmental Engineering department in January 2017 as an Assistant Professor.
Assistant Professor, Bioengineering
617.373.7018
Prof. Bajpayee works on drug delivery to connective and charged tissues such as cartilage, meniscus, intervertebral disc and mucosal membranes. Her lab utilizes concepts of nanomedicine and bio-electrostatics to design polypeptides and protein-based carriers for targeted and sustained delivery of small molecule drugs, protein growth factors, antibodies and genetic materials to specific intra-tissue and intra-cellular target sites inside connective tissues.
A main focus is on using charge interactions and other binding mechanisms to rationally design drug carriers that can penetrate through the dense matrix of avascular, negatively charged tissues. Her lab is also interested in understanding mechanisms leading to degenerative joint diseases (e.g., osteoarthritis) due to ageing and traumatic injuries. The group strives to combine basic science with translational research to develop biomedical technologies.
Director, Asian Studies Program
Associate Professor of Public Policy & Architecture
Director, MS Urban and Regional Policy Program
Professor Shatkin has a joint appointment in the School of Public Policy & Urban Affairs (75%) and the School of Architecture (25%). His research focuses primarily on globalization and urban poverty in Southeast Asian cities. He is the author of Collective Action and Urban Poverty Alleviation: Community Organizations and the Struggle for Shelter in Manila. He has published articles in a number of journals, including Urban Studies, Environment and Planning, The International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Cities, and the International Development Planning Review.
Prior to coming to Northeastern, Shatkin was an associate professor of urban planning at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. He was also a faculty associate in the Center for South Asian Studies and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies.
Associate Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Babak Heydari joined the Mechanical & Industrial Engineering department in August 2018 as an Associate Professor. He earned his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include socio-technical systems, systems engineering and design, social and economic networks, resilience of networked systems, computational social sciences, platform-based systems, sharing economy systems, computational social sciences, game theory, artificial intelligence.
Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Stefano Basagni holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Dallas (December 2001) and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Milano, Italy (May 1998). He received his B.Sc. degree in computer science from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 1991. Since Winter 2002 he is an associate professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University, in Boston, MA.
Dr. Basagni's current research interests concern research and implementation aspects of mobile networks and wireless communications systems, wireless sensor networking for IoT (underwater and terrestrial), definition and performance evaluation of network protocols and theoretical and practical aspects of distributed algorithms.
Dr. Basagni has published over seven dozen of highly cited, refereed technical papers and book chapters. His h-index is currently 41. He is also co-editor of three books. Dr. Basagni served as a guest editor of multiple international ACM/IEEE, Wiley and Elsevier journals. He has been the TPC co-chair of international conferences such as ACM Dial M for Mobility (2004), Med Hoc Net (2006), IEEE SECON (2010), IEEE Globecom (AHSN Symposium, 2012), IEEE MASS (2012), IEEE WiMob 2013, IEEE ICNC (NAPE Symposium, 2015), IFIP Wireless Days 2016, ACM WUWNet (2017), IEEE ICNC (WAHS Symposium, 2018), Med Hoc Net (2018), and IEEE ICNC(NAPE Symposium, 2019). He is the general co-chair of IEEE SECON 2019.
Dr. Basagni serves as a member of the editorial board, the organizing committee and of the technical program committee of ACM and IEEE journals and international conferences. He is a distinguished scientist of the ACM (including the ACM SIGMOBILE), a senior member of the IEEE (Computer and Communications societies), a member of ASEE (American Society for Engineering Education) and of CUR (Council for Undergraduate Education).
Professor of the Practice in Criminology and Criminal Justice
Director of the Institute on Race and Justice
Jack McDevitt is the director of Northeastern’s Institute on Race and Justice. He is also professor of the practice in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. McDevitt is the co-author of three books: Hate Crimes: The Rising Tide of Bigotry and Bloodshed, Hate Crime Revisited: American War on Those Who Are Different (both with Jack Levin) and Victimology (with Judy Sgarzy). He has spoken on hate crime, racial profiling human trafficking and security both nationally and internationally and has testified as an expert witness before the Judiciary Committees of both U.S. Senate and The U.S. House of Representatives and as invited expert at the White House. In January 2013, McDevitt was appointed by Massachusetts House Speaker Robert DeLeo to lead a special commission on gun violence.
Associate Director and Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice
617.373.7439
Professor Farrell joined the tenure track faculty in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice in 2008. Prior to that time she served as the assistant director of the Institute on Race and Justice and a faculty researcher at Northeastern University. Her research seeks to understand arrest, adjudication and criminal case disposition practices. Professor Farrell is the co-author of Not Guilty: Are the Acquitted Innocent, published by New York University Press in 2012 (with Daniel Givelber) and co-editor of Deadly injustice: Trayvon Martin, race, and the criminal justice system published by New York University Press, 2015 (with Devon Johnson and Patricia Warren).
Professor Farrell’s research seeks to understanding how the criminal justice system responds to newly recognized and prioritized crimes such as hate crimes and human trafficking. Professor Farrell collaborated on research examining challenges to police identification and reporting of hate crimes. Professor Farrell co-authored a report for the National Institute of Justice on hate crimes against immigrants in the U.S. and is currently conducting research on youth and Latino/a experiences of bias motivated crime victimization. She oversees a program to collect data on human trafficking investigations for the U.S. Department of Justice and has studied and published research about how local, state and federal law enforcement agencies identify, investigate and prosecute human trafficking cases. She recently completed projects examining labor trafficking victimization in the US and assign the effectiveness of state anti-trafficking law reform efforts.
Professor Farrell has testified about police identification of human trafficking before the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. She was also appointed to the Massachusetts Attorneys General Human Trafficking Policy Task Force and oversaw a committee that developed recommendations for improving the collection and sharing of data on human trafficking victims in the Commonwealth. Professor Farrell was a co-recipient of NIJ’s W.E.B. DuBois Fellowship on crime justice and culture in 2006 and the American Society Criminology Mentor of the Year Awardee in 2014.
Associate Professor & Associate Dean of Research
Dr. Tunik received his B.S. in Physical Therapy from Northeastern University, PhD in Neuroscience from Rutgers University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Department of Psychological and Brain Science at Dartmouth College. Prior to coming to Northeastern in 2015, Dr. Tunik has held faculty appointments at NYU and Rutgers University. His primary research interest is in the study of brain mechanisms involved in human motor control, motor learning, and motor recovery from disease.
Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and International Affairs
Laura Kuhl is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and the International Affairs Program. Her research examines climate adaptation and resilience in developing countries. Prior to Northeastern, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at the Fletcher School, where she helped establish a new research partnership with the United Nation Development Program (UNDP) on climate policy in developing countries. She has studied innovation, technology transfer and adoption for adaptation as well as mainstreaming adaptation in development policy in East Africa and Central America. Current projects also address climate information and early warning systems, coastal resilience and national adaptation plans. She has conducted fieldwork in Ethiopia, Honduras, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and New England and has collaborated with the Global Environment Facility (GEF), United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and UNDP. She has a PhD and MALD in International Affairs from the Fletcher School, Tufts University, and a BA in Environmental Studies and Anthropology from Middlebury College.
Vice President, Nahant Campus Operations
Director, Coastal Sustainability Institute
Professor and Chair, Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences
Dr. Trussell received his PhD from the College of William and Mary and completed his postdoctoral studies at Brown University before joining the faculty of Northeastern. He is presently Professor and Chair of the Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences and Director of the Marine Science Center. In 2012 Dr. Trussell developed the white paper that led to the creation the Urban Coastal Sustainability Initiative (UCSI). The overarching goal of UCSI is to create an interdisciplinary research hub that leverages existing strengths in ocean science, engineering and policy to respond to the major environmental threats facing the world’s coastal marine habitats, particularly those located in urban centers, as well as both social and technical tools and strategies necessary to overcome these threats. UCSI is now producing innovative solutions that create cleaner, safer, and smarter coastal communities. The success of this initiative has paved the way for UCSI to evolve into the Northeastern Institute for Coastal Sustainability.
Dr. Trussell’s research program focuses on a number of issues related to coastal sustainability and the evolutionary and community ecology of natural ecosystems. Since arriving at Northeastern he has served at the lead PI or Co-PI on grants totaling $6.1M and has published over 65 papers and book chapters. During his research career he has gone to a depth of 2.5 miles on the East Pacific Rise in the Alvin Deep Submergence Vehicle and lived for 10 days underwater in the Aquarius Undersea Research Habitat, 11 miles offshore in the Florida Keys.
Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering. Affiliated Assistant Professor Computer Science and Information Sciences.
617.373.8999
Devesh's research focus on developing novel computational analytical tools and models toward designing resilient, sustainable, and scalable systems. His research interest also involves applying resilience, high performance computing, and data analytics expertise to emerging inter-disciplinary research domains. The long-term, overarching goal of his research is to increase the sustainability and resilience of complex infrastructure including data-center-scale computing systems, health care industry, medical devices, transportation systems, power-grid infrastructures, and communication systems.
His research publications have received best paper award nominations at top resilience and high performance computing systems conferences including Supercomputing (SC), Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), and Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS). His work has appeared in various conferences such as USENIX FAST, SC, DSN, HPCA, MICRO, IPDPS, and have been covered by the news media including Slashdot and HPCWire.
Before joining Northeastern, Devesh was a staff scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a flagship multiprogram science and technology national laboratory of the United States Department of Energy (DOE). Devesh earned his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University. Before that, he obtained his B.S. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur in India.
Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
617.373.8114
Taskin Padir is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, with a courtesy appointment at CCIS, at Northeastern University. He received his PhD and MS degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue University. He holds a BS in electrical and electronics engineering from the Middle East Technical University in Turkey.
He is the Director of Robotics and Intelligent Vehicles Research Laboratory (RIVeR Lab). His projects have been sponsored by NSF, NASA, DARPA, AFRL, and many industry partners. Professor Padir led project teams for the NASA Sample Return Robot Centennial Challenge, SmartAmerica Challenge and the DARPA Robotics Challenge. Professor Padir presented at the Innovation on the Edge: Accelerating Solutions in the Fight Against Ebola event hosted by OSTP and USAID at the White House in 2015 and organized and hosted OSTP/NRI Workshop on Safety Robotics for Ebola Workers in 2014. A team led by Padir was recently selected to receive one of NASA’s humanoid robot Valkyrie for research and development.
Associate Professor, School of Architecture
p.wiederspahn@northeastern.edu
617.373.4538
Peter Wiederspahn is an associate professor at Northeastern University, Boston, MA. His research and pedagogical focus is architectural design, building technologies, and design research entrepreneurship. He was the Associate Dean of Academic and Faculty Affairs for the Northeastern College of Arts, Media and Design, and intermittently the Interim Director of the School of Architecture. Additionally, he was the inaugural Director of the School of Architecture Berlin Semester Abroad. He has also held teaching positions at Harvard University, Dartmouth College, and the Pennsylvania State University. Professor Wiederspahn earned his Bachelor of Architecture from Syracuse University and his Master of Architecture from the Harvard University.
Professor Wiederspahn conducts scholarly, technical and design research. In general, he focuses on architectural design, production, performance, and systems. In particular, he has conducted research on the following topics: future-use architecture; wood construction and its cultural impact at the detail, architectural and urban scales; wood-frame building envelope performance; mutable domestic space; high-performance, rapid-assembly structural/thermal component construction system; and flat-pack, rapid-deployment, long-term-use emergency shelter system; furniture design.
Professor Wiederspahn is a co-PI for the 2017 FAIA Latrobe Prize, he has been awarded a Graham Foundation grant for his research entitled, “Wood Frame Multi-Family Housing in Boston, 1865-1900,” and has received a design research grant from the Boston Society of Architect for “Smart Growth Planning Prototypes.” Through his research and pedagogy, he has collaborated with the Northeastern College of Engineering and the College of Business Administration on student capstone projects for designing and producing business plans for prefabricated component construction systems.
Professor Wiederspahn is also the principal of Wiederspahn Architecture, LLC. His architectural practice has produced residential, multi-family, commercial and interior projects in Boston, New York and Chicago, and has received numerous design excellence awards.
Associate Professor of Game Design
Dr. Casper Harteveld is an Associate Professor of Game Design at Northeastern University, has affiliated appointments in Computer Science, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, and with the School of Law, and works closely with faculty in Marine Science and Public Policy. His research focuses on using games to study and improve decision-making, and through these efforts both to advance our knowledge and to engage a broad cross-section of people globally about societal issues. He applies games especially in areas where it is challenging to study and educate in natural environments and collects detailed and expansive behavioral data in a controlled manner.
Working across disciplines, Dr. Harteveld has designed and evaluated games on flooding, urban heat islands, debris collection, and pro se litigants. He is a strong proponent of integrating research and education and a significant portion of his work is devoted to translating research outcomes to the classroom or informal settings, in order to make sure that the next generation is ready to deal with the societal challenges of the 21st Century.
For his work, Dr. Harteveld was awarded the Young Talent Prize of Information Systems, Special Prize for best dissertation in simulation & gaming, five National Science Foundation awards, and DARPA’s Young Faculty Award. He is also a National Science Foundation Fellow of the Next Generation of Hazards & Disasters Researchers program.
He lives with his wife in Boston and enjoys playing soccer, running, hiking, and traveling.
Academic Advisor, Graduate Programs Manager, Part-Time Lecturer
Aleszu Bajak manages Northeastern's School of Journalism’s Media Innovation and Media Advocacy graduate programs and teaches courses in journalism, coding and data visualization.
He is also the editor of Storybench.org, an under the hood guide to digital storytelling from the journalism school. In 2016, he was a founding senior writer at Undark, a magazine exploring the intersection of science and society based at the Knight Science Journalism Program at M.I.T., a fellowship he was awarded in 2013 where he explored the interface between journalists, designers and developers.
Bajak has been a freelance reporter in Latin America, a producer for the public radio show Science Friday, the founding editor of Esquire Classic, and once upon a time worked in the gene therapy department at Weill Cornell. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, the Boston Globe magazine, MIT Technology Review, Nature, Science, New Scientist, and Guernica, among other outlets.
Professor and Chair of Cultures, Societies and Global Studies Education
José F. Buscaglia is a philosopher, university administrator, and consultant. Deeply trans-disciplinary, his work deals primarily with the history of ideas and social institutions, the discourse on the human body in theorizing the public sphere and citizenship rights, as well as exploring questions of historical memory and the political imaginary in the Atlantic World. One of his long-standing interests is the ideology of racialism and the institutional persistence of the concept of race as it continues to inform power relations on a global scale. More recently he has been focusing on reclaiming supra-national formulations for rethinking geo-political possibilities and citizenship rights in the Greater Caribbean and the Western Hemisphere.
In Undoing Empire, Race, and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean (2003) Buscaglia coined the neologism of “mulataje” as a practice of thinking and being that, since the 16th Century, has continuously attempted to undo the calculations of racialist ideology and its mechanisms of labor control and social policing. He has also reclaimed the term “Usonian” to refer to the peoples, nationalist ideologies and neo-imperial tradition of the United States of America. His most recent book is a critical edition of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s 1690 account of piracy and captivity, Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez (2011).
Buscaglia is the former director of the University of Havana-University at Buffalo MA Program in Caribbean Cultural Studies (2002-2014).
Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
617.373.5222
Mehrdad Sasani is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and his MS in Structural Engineering from Tehran Polytechnic. His research and scholarship interests include: the progressive collapse of structures; earthquake engineering; and structural integrity and reliability; and community resilience.
Professor, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Northeastern University
617.373.7462
Dr. Özlem Ergun was the Coca-Cola Associate Professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology until August 2014 when she joined Northeastern University. She has also a co-founded and co-directed the Health and Humanitarian Systems Research Center at the Supply Chain and Logistics Institute. She received a B.S. in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from Cornell University in 1996 and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001.
Dr. Özlem Ergun’s research focuses on the design and management of large-scale networks. She has applied her work on network design, management and collaboration to problems arising in the airline, ocean cargo and trucking industries. Recently, Dr. Ergun’s work has been focused on the use of systems thinking and mathematical modeling in applications with societal impact. She has worked with organizations that respond to humanitarian crisis around the world, including: UN WFP, UNHCR, IFRC, CARE USA, FEMA, USACE, CDC, AFCEMA, and MedShare International.
David DeSteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, where he directs the Social Emotions Group. At the broadest level, his work examines the mechanisms of the mind that shape vice and virtue. Studying hypocrisy and compassion, pride and punishment, cheating and trust, his work continually reveals that human moral behavior is much more variable than most would predict.
David is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological Association, for which he serves as editor-in-chief of the journal Emotion. His work has been repeatedly funded by the National Science Foundation and has been regularly featured in the media, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CBS Sunday Morning, NPR's Radiolab and Talk of the Nation, and USA Today.
He is the author of The Truth About Trust and co-author of The Wall Street Journal spotlight psychology bestseller Out of Character. He has written about his research for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Harvard Business Review, Pacific Standard, Mother Jones, and The Atlantic.
David received his Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University.
Professor, Marine and Environmental Sciences
Joseph Ayers, Ph.D. is Professor of Biology, Department of Biology and Marine Science Center, Northeastern University, Boston and East Point, Nahant, Massachusetts. His lab builds biomimetic robots based on simple neurobiological models, the lobster and sea lamprey. The robots feature a physical plant that captures the biomechanical advantages of the body form, a neuronal circuit-based controller, neuromorphic sensors, myomorphic actuators and a behavioral set based on action patterns, reverse engineered from movies of the animal models. The controllers are based on neuronal circuits established from neurophysiology. To achieve real-time operation, his team bases the electronic neurons on nonlinear dynamical models of neuronal behavior rather than physiological models. They employ both UCSD electronic neurons and synapses (analog computers that solve the Hindmarsh-Rose equations) and discrete time map based neurons and synapses that are integrated on a DSP. Together these components provide an integrated architecture for the control of innate behavioral action patterns and reactive autonomy.
Dean's Professor of Civic Sustainability and Professor of English. Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Diversity and Inclusion in the College of Social Science and Humanities
As Dean’s Professor of Civic Sustainability, my research explores the perseverance of people made possible with reading and writing. I’m currently co-leading a team that is developing a digital archive to support the translation of Cherokee language manuscripts housed in museums and archives around the country in an effort to advance language perseverance and preservation efforts. This project has been generously supported with an Institute for Museums and Library Services Sparks! Ignition Grant and a Northeastern University Tier 1 Grant.
My current research also includes two forthcoming edited collections: Literacies: A Critical Sourcebook, 2nd edition, with co-editors Christina Haas and Mike Rose (Macmillan); and Landmark Essays on Rhetorics of Difference, with co-editors Damián Baca and Jonathan Osborne (Routledge). My sole-authored books, The Cherokee Syllabary: Writing the People’s Perseverance (Oklahoma UP 2012) and The Struggle and the Tools: Oral and Literate Strategies in an Inner City Community, (SUNY UP 1998) were based on activist qualitative research with my tribe and urban community members in upstate New York.
Director, Northeastern University Center for Health Policy and Healthcare Research
Professor of Strategic Management and Healthcare Systems
617.373.2528
Gary Young is Director of the Northeastern University Center for Health Policy and Healthcare Research as well as Professor of Strategic Management and Healthcare Systems, Northeastern University. He is also affiliated with the Health Services Research and Development Service of the Department of Veterans Affairs. Dr. Young’s research focuses on organizational, managerial, and legal issues associated with the delivery of healthcare services. He has received research funding from both government agencies and private foundations including the National Science Foundation, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. His published work has appeared in such journals as the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, Health Affairs, Medical Care, and Academy of Management Journal. In 1998, he received from the Association of University Programs in Health Administration (AUPHA) the John D. Thompson Prize in Health Services Research. In 2012, he was appointed by the US Secretary of the Treasury to the Internal Revenue Service’s Advisory Committee on Tax Exempt and Government Entities, one of several congressionally mandated committees that advise the IRS on policy and procedural issues. He received a law degree and Ph.D. in Management from the State University of New York.
Associate Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and Economics
Associate Director, Dukakis Center
617.373.7998
Alicia Sasser Modestino is an associate professor with appointments in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and the Department of Economics at Northeastern University. Since 2015 she has also served as the associate director of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy and is currently a nonresident fellow in the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. Previously, Modestino was a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston where she lead numerous research projects on regional economic and policy issues for the New England Public Policy Center.
Modestino’s research focuses on the intersection between labor and health care markets including youth labor market attachment, skills mismatch, migration, and the impact of health care reform on employers. Currently with funding from GRI, she is investigating the underlying factors associated with the prescribing of opioids that can provide insight into how to make communities more resilient to addiction. Her work has also been funded by the William T. Grant Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the National Science Foundation and has been published in peer-reviewed publications including Journal of Human Resources, Labour Economics, Health Affairs, and Regional Science and Urban Economics. Modestino holds both a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, where she also served as a doctoral fellow in the Inequality and Social Policy Program at the Kennedy School of Government.
Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs
Emily R. Clough is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and the International Affairs Program. She studies comparative politics and the political economy of development, with a regional focus on India. Her research and teaching interests focus on public service delivery, state capacity and government performance, civil society, democracy and political accountability, education, bureaucratic behavior and corruption, inequality and distributive politics, the ethics and politics of global philanthropy, and multi-method research design. Past research has focused on food politics, private governance and the ethical certification of global supply chains. Her first book project examines the impact of NGOs on state service provision in India, focusing especially on the education sector. She has published articles on the intellectual history of the civil society concept and its relevance to empirical studies of development, and on the private-sector substitutes for effective state regulatory enforcement in developing countries with weakly enforced labor and environmental regulations. Prior to Northeastern, Professor Clough completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society and one year as visiting assistant instructor in Government and Asian Studies at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. She holds a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University (2017) and a B.A. in political science from Swarthmore College (2003). Between college and graduate school, she spent five years working for the non-profit and social enterprise sectors in the fields of international development, Fair Trade, and conflict resolution.
Professor of Communication Studies and Affiliate Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, Northeastern University
617.373.3330
Matthew C. Nisbet, Ph.D. is Professor of Communication Studies and Affiliate Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Environmental Communication; a Senior Editor at ORE Climate Science; and a consulting communication researcher to the AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion.
Nisbet holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Communication from Cornell University and a BA in Government from Dartmouth College. Nisbet studies the role of communication, journalism, and advocacy in shaping debates over complex policy issues such as climate change, income inequality, or gene editing. He is the author or co-author of more than 75 peer-reviewed studies, scholarly book chapters, and reports including the recent U.S. National Academies consensus study on Communicating Science Effectively: A Research Agenda.
With his co-author Declan Fahy, he is currently writing a book with Harvard University Press that examines the influence of a special generation of public intellectuals who have helped define the major scientific and social issues of our time. By evaluating the careers of writers like Bill McKibben, David Brooks, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Susan Faludi, Michael Pollan, Fareed Zakaria, Malcolm Gladwell, and Naomi Klein, the book explores the power of ideas and narratives to influence public opinion, inspire social movements, and alter political decisions. In other current projects, Nisbet is analyzing the role of strategic philanthropy in supporting actions to address climate change; evaluating sources of financial support for non-profit journalism; studying the impact of income inequality on public reservations about science and technology; and evaluating strategies for promoting thoughtful dialogue about science and religion.
Among awards and recognition, he has been a Visiting Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, a Health Policy Investigator at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and a Google Science Communication Fellow. Nisbet serves on the editorial boards for Public Understanding of Science and the International Journal of Press/Politics, and on the Board of Directors for the International Environmental Communication Association. He is an affiliated researcher with the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine and the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University.
Assistant Professor of Economics
857.869.5353
Ivan Petkov received his Ph.D. in economics from Boston College in 2016. His research interests focus on macroeconomics, finance, monetary economics, banking, and economic growth. In his dissertation he studied whether the allocation of bank credit to small businesses at distinct branches responds to liquidity increases or rise in asset prices. In a separate stream of research he also examined whether differences in cultural and institutional endowments of ancestries in U.S. counties affect economic performance. He has also studied the process of cultural assimilation of immigrants in the U.S.
Dr. Brown is interested in the intersection of science, social movements, and the politics of environmental knowledge. He received a 2016 ACLS Fellowship and the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin for his current book project, The Greening of Cold War Germany: Environmentalism and Social Movements across the Wall and Beyond, 1968-1989. Previous books include West Germany in the Global Sixties: The Anti-Authoritarian Revolt, 1962-1978 (Cambridge 2013); The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: Media, Counterculture, Revolt (Palgrave 2014); and Between the Avantgarde and the Everyday: Subversive Politics in Europe, 1957 to the Present (Berghahn 2011). His new book, Sixties Europe, is forthcoming in Spring 2020 with Cambridge University Press. Dr. Brown is a 2019 Fellow of the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, Germany, and currently serves as co-coordinator of the Environmental Studies Network of the German Studies Association.
Professor of Landscape Architecture
Director of the Urban Landscape Program
617.373.4614
Jane Amidon is a Professor of Landscape Architecture and Director of the Urban Landscape Program in the Northeastern University School of Architecture. Jane teaches studio, lecture and seminar courses focused on the ideas, histories and design strategies of changing cities.
Jane has lectured and published extensively on contemporary urban landscape and the related topics of modernism and modernization of the American landscape. Recent publications include “Big Nature,” in Design Ecologies: Essays on the Nature of Design (Blostein and Tilder, eds) and “Eclogue for the Metropolis,” in PRAXIS Journal. Published books include Radical Landscapes: Reinventing Outdoor Space and monographs on Kathryn Gustafson and Dan Kiley. She was the founding editor for the Source Books in Landscape Architecture series and published the first four books of that series. She co-organized three Landscape Complexity and Transformation conferences in collaboration with The Cultural Landscape Foundation, and continues to lecture at universities and institutions internationally.
Professor of the Practice in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs
Linda Kowalcky is a Professor of the Practice in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, where she teaches public policy, public administration, and oversees the School’s experiential learning programs. Her career spans service in federal and local government as well as academia. Most recently, Linda worked for former Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, with responsibility for higher education policy, partnerships, campus planning. She also served as senior staff in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Linda previously taught American government and public policy as an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and as an adjunct at Wellesley College, Northeastern University, and the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the Johns Hopkins University.
University Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Health Sciences
Director, Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute
617.373.7407
Phil Brown is University Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Health Science at Northeastern University, where he directs the Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute.
He is the author of No Safe Place: Toxic Waste, Leukemia, and Community Action, and Toxic Exposures: Contested Illnesses and the Environmental Health Movement, and co-editor of Social Movements in Health, and Contested Illnesses: Citizens, Science and Health Social Movements. He studies biomonitoring and household exposure and reporting back data to participants in collaboration with Silent Spring Institute, social policy concerning flame retardants and perfluorinated compounds, and health social movements. He directs an NIEHS T-32 training program, “Transdisciplinary Training at the Intersection of Environmental Health and Social Science.” He heads the Community Outreach and Translation Core of Northeastern’s Children’s Environmental Health Center (Center for Research on Early Childhood Exposure and Development in Puerto Rico/CRECE) and both the Research Translation Core and Community Engagement Core of Northeastern’s Superfund Research Program (Puerto Rico Testsite to Explore Contamination Threats (PROTECT).
He is on the National Advisory Environmental Health Science Council, which advises the director of NIH’s National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
Professor, School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs
Jo.Fitzgerald@northeastern.edu
617.373.3644
Joan Fitzgerald focuses on urban climate governance and the connections between urban sustainability and economic development and innovation in European and North American Cities. She is working on her fourth book, Greenovation: Urban Leadership on Climate Change (Oxford Univ. Press, 2018). Her third book, Emerald Cities: Urban Sustainability and Economic Development (Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), examines how cities are creating economic development opportunities in several green sectors and discusses the state and national policy needed to support these efforts. Fitzgerald has published in academic journals such as Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, Local Environment, Economic Development Quarterly, Urban Affairs Quarterly, Urban Affairs, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and the political quarterly, The American Prospect.
Her courses include Cities, Sustainability and Climate Change and Urban Revitalization at the graduate level, and an undergraduate course, Introduction to Law, Policy and Society. Before coming to Northeastern University, Joan taught urban planning and policy at the New School University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Ohio State University.
Associate Professor of Applied Psychology
617.373.2486
Christie J. Rizzo, Associate Professor of Applied Psychology, earned a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Southern California. She completed her internship in Clinical Psychology at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School and her postdoctoral fellowship in Clinical Psychology at the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies (CAAS) at Brown University. Dr. Rizzo was previously the Assistant Director of the Juvenile Mental Health Clinic at the Rhode Island Family Court. Dr. Rizzo’s research focuses on the development and implementation of evidence-based, violence and risk behavior prevention programming for youth, including technology-based initiatives. Her prevention work centers around the use of skills-based approaches to both reduce risk and promote resilience among our most vulnerable youth including those involved in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems.
Associate Professor of Marketing and Joseph G. Riesman Research Professor
Thomas E. Moore Faculty Fellow
Associate Fellow, Center for Emerging Markets
Research Fellow, INSEAD Emerging Markets Institute
Affiliate Scholar, University of Oxford Future of Marketing Initiative
Yakov Bart is Associate Professor of Marketing and Joseph G. Riesman Research Professor at D'Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University. He holds a PhD and an M.S. in Business Administration from the University of California at Berkeley, an S.M. in Operations Research from MIT, and a Diploma in Mathematics from Moscow State University. Prior to joining Northeastern University, Yakov was a marketing professor at INSEAD and visiting faculty at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Yakov has done research, teaching, and consulting throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. His research examining marketing implications of new digital technologies and business models has been funded with multiple research awards and grants, presented at numerous academic conferences across the globe, and published in leading marketing and management journals, including Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Management Science, and Harvard Business Review. Yakov won awards for the Best Paper published in Decision Analysis in 2014 and in Journal of Interactive Marketing in 2016.
Yakov has received several awards for outstanding teaching in Executive Education programs, has taught undergraduate, MBA, and PhD courses, and delivered management training in Bangladesh, France, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, the UK, and throughout the United States. His pedagogical materials have been widely used in business education, including an award-winning bestseller case study on Renova Paper. Yakov has co-authored a widely used digital textbook Social Media Marketing: Principles and Strategies. He was also named as one of the world’s top 40 undergraduate business school professors by Poets&Quants in 2017.
Yakov is a frequent speaker on digital marketing and social media at international business summits and industry events, including Teradata Analytics Universe and World Knowledge Forum. He worked with such industry leaders as American Express, General Motors, Google, Havas, Intel, Kantar Media, LVMH, Nielsen, NPD Group, Sberbank and WPP.
Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
617.373.3051
Ali Abur obtained his B.S. degree from Orta Dogu Teknik Universitesi, Turkey in 1979 and both his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Ohio State University in 1981 and 1985 respectively. He was a faculty member at Texas A&M University until November 2005 when he joined the faculty of Northeastern University as a Professor and Chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. His research and educational activities have been in the area of power systems. He is a Fellow of the IEEE for his work on power system state estimation. He co-authored a book and published widely in IEEE journals and conferences.
Associate Professor of Philosophy
617.373.6151
Serena Parekh is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University in Boston, where she is the director of the Politics, Philosophy, and Economics Program and editor of the American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy. Her primary philosophical interests are in social and political philosophy, feminist theory, and continental philosophy. Her most recent book, Refugees and the Ethics of Forced Displacement, was published with Routledge in 2017. Her first book, Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity: A Phenomenology of Human Rights, was published in 2008 and translated into Chinese. She has also published numerous articles on social and political philosophy in Hypatia, Philosophy and Social Criticism, and Human Rights Quarterly.
Associate Professor
Associate Chair of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Civil and Engineering
Edward Beighley is an Associate Professor and the Associate Chair of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Civil and Engineering at Northeastern University. He is also an affiliated faculty member of the Global Resilience Institute and in the Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences at Northeastern University. Before joining Northeastern, he was an Associate Professor in the Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering Department at San Diego State University. His research integrates satellite remote sensing and numerical modeling to characterize hydrologic hazards and risks for current and future climate and land use conditions. His use of remote sensing enables the development of novel applications that support the design and management of civil infrastructure in developing regions where in-situ data are often limited.
Beighley’s research builds on his experience working in the insurance industry, where he served as the technical lead for hydrological science research at FM Global, the worldwide leader in commercial and industrial property insurance. He blends both his academic and industrial experience to develop novel applications to enable sustainable and resilient communities. His research portfolio is diverse with funding from national, state and local agencies, private industry and non-profit organizations. He received the National Air and Space Administration’s prestigious New Investigator Award and his most recent projects include NASA grants supporting the Surface and Ocean Water Topography (SWOT) mission, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment mission, and the Terrestrial Hydrology Program. For the SWOT mission, he is one of only two Applications Scientists and a member of the science team.
Professor and Chair, Department of Health Sciences
617.373.7326
Sharon L. Harlan is Professor of Health Sciences and Sociology at Northeastern University. Dr. Harlan’s research explores the human impacts of climate change that are dependent upon people’s positions in social hierarchies, places in built environments of unequal quality, and policies that improve or impede human adaptive capabilities.
Focusing on excessive heat as a significant and increasingly critical threat to human health and well-being in cities, she studies urban landscapes that produce unequal risks for people in neighborhoods divided by social class and race/ethnicity. She has led multi-institutional, interdisciplinary research and community engagement projects that integrate social theories about the historical production of environmental injustices with data and models from the ecological, geospatial, and health sciences.
Her work on coupled natural and human systems has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation on urban vulnerability to climate change, sustainability and social equity in urban water systems, the Central Arizona–Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research program, and metropolitan area surveys on environmental attitudes and behaviors. She has served as an advisor on climate justice and social vulnerability to organizations such as the American Sociological Association, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the Social Science Coordinating Committee of the U.S. Global Climate Change Research Program.
Dr. Harlan earned a BA in Sociology at Northeastern University and a PhD in Sociology from Cornell University.
Distinguished Professor and Director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice
617.373.3327
Anthony A. Braga is a distinguished professor and director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice effective July 1, 2016. Braga’s record combines deep engagement in Boston and an international reputation as a leading researcher on crime prevention. He collaborates with criminal justice, social service, and community-based organizations to produce high impact scholarship, randomized field experiments, and policy advice on the prevention of crime at problem places, the control of gang violence, and reductions in access to firearms by criminals. With colleagues, Braga has published numerous peer reviewed journal articles in top criminology and criminal justice journals such as Criminology, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Justice Quarterly, and the Journal of Quantitative Criminology. Braga has authored three books and edited seven volumes with top scholarly presses such as Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press.
Braga has served as principal investigator or co-principal investigator on projects totaling more than $11 million dollars in external funding from a variety of federal, state, and private grant-making institutions including the U.S. National Institute of Justice, National Institutes of Health, and National Science Foundation. He is currently serving as a committee member for the National Research Council Committee on Proactive Policing – Effects on Crime, Communities, and Civil Liberties and the Science Advisory Board to the Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Braga is a fellow of the American Society of Criminology (ASC). He is also a past president and fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology (AEC), and the 2014 recipient of its Joan McCord Award recognizing his commitment to randomized controlled experiments.
The practical value of his work in violence reduction in disadvantaged neighborhoods has been recognized by a numerous awards, including the Civic Leadership Award (2004) presented by The Boston Foundation, the United States Attorney General’s Award for Outstanding Contributions to Community Partnerships for Public Safety (2009), and the U.S. Department of Justice Project Safe Neighborhoods Research Partner of the Year Award (2010). Between 2007 and 2013, Braga served as Chief Policy Advisor to former Boston Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis and worked with his command staff and line-level officers on award-winning community policing and crime prevention initiatives. Braga holds an M.P.A. from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in criminal justice from Rutgers University.
University Distinguished Professor of Law and Criminal Justice
Faculty Director, Professional Development
617.373.6590
Professor Medwed teaches Criminal Law, Evidence, and Advanced Criminal Procedure: Wrongful Convictions and Post-Conviction Remedies. His research and pro bono activities revolve around the topic of wrongful convictions. His book, Prosecution Complex: America’s Race to Convict and Its Impact on the Innocent (New York University Press, 2012), explores how even well-meaning prosecutors may contribute to wrongful convictions because of cognitive biases and an overly-deferential regime of legal and ethical rules. His recently published Wrongful Convictions and the DNA Revolution: Twenty-Five Years of Freeing the Innocent (Cambridge University Press, 2017), discusses the lessons learned from a quarter century of DNA exonerations. Professor Medwed is a legal analyst for WGBH News, Boston’s local NPR and PBS affiliate.
In 2013, Professor Medwed received one of Northeastern’s most prestigious prizes, the Robert D. Klein University Lectureship, which is awarded to a member of the faculty across the university who has obtained distinction in his or her field of study. He is a founding member of the board of directors of the Innocence Network, a consortium of innocence projects throughout the world, and a former president of the board of directors of the Rocky Mountain Innocence Center in Salt Lake City. He currently serves on the board of directors of the New England Innocence Project as well as Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts.
Prior to joining Northeastern in 2012, Professor Medwed was professor of law at the University of Utah. He also previously served as an instructor at Brooklyn Law School and helped oversee the school’s Second Look Program, where he worked with students to investigate and litigate innocence claims by New York state prisoners. Professor Medwed has earned numerous teaching prizes over the course of his career. He has also worked in private practice and as an associate appellate counsel at the Legal Aid Society, Criminal Appeals Bureau, of New York City.
Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Studies, Northeastern University
617-373-5161
Ryan Ellis is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern. Ryan’s research and teaching focuses on topics related to communication law and policy, infrastructure politics, and cybersecurity. Prior to joining the Department, Ryan held fellowships at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). He received a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of California, San Diego.
CDM Smith Professor and Chair Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
617.373.3242
Jerome F. Hajjar is the CDM Smith Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University. He is also the Director of the Laboratory for Structural Testing of Resilient and Sustainable Systems (STReSS Laboratory). He has served as Chair of the Structures Faculty and as Deputy Director of the NSF Mid-America Earthquake Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was a Professor and Narbey Khachaturian Faculty Scholar from 2005-2010. His research and teaching interests include analysis, experimental testing, and design of steel and composite steel/concrete building and bridge structures, regional modeling and assessment of infrastructure systems, and earthquake engineering, and he has published over 200 papers and edited three books on these topics.
Prior to joining the University of Illinois, he was a Professor at the University of Minnesota since 1992. He has also served as the Information Technology Director for the NSF George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) experimental testing facilities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Minnesota. Prior to joining the University of Minnesota, Dr. Hajjar was a structural engineer and associate at the architectural/engineering firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in their Chicago and New York offices.
Dr. Hajjar serves on the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) Committee on Specifications and several of its task committees, including chairing Task Committee 5 on Composite Construction. He is the past chair of AISC Task Committee 3 on Loads, Analysis, and Systems and AISC Subcommittee 6 on Composite Construction for AISC Task Committee 9 on Seismic Design, and he led the editing of the AISC Commentary for the 2005 AISC Specification.
Associate Professor of Marine and Environmental Sciences
781.581.7370 x346
My work runs the gamut from understanding how human derived nutrients are altering the structure and function of salt marshes to examining whether oyster aquaculture increases the prevalence of both beneficial and harmful microorganisms in the environment. At the broadest levels, I am interested in how human activities are altering the structure and function of microbial communities and in turn how microbial communities can help ameliorate pollution from human sources.
The Boston area provides a great location for understanding how urban ecosystems influence biogeochemical cycling and the microbes that are responsible for those processes. Currently funded projects in my lab include 1) a long-term nutrient enrichment experiment at the Plum Island Long-Term Ecological Research site in Northern Massachusetts that aims to understand how coastal eutrophication will affect the sustainability of salt marsh ecosystems, and 2) Understanding how marsh restorations, including the Rumney Marsh, in Revere, MA, alter the capacity of marshes to remove land-derived nitrogen. We also have new projects that we are starting examining different aspects of plant – microbe and animal – microbe interactions, including how the invasive reed Phragmites australis alters microbial community structure compared to native lineages and how antibiotic treatment affects the microbiome of the Kemps Ridley sea turtle using a variety of cutting edge tools from molecular biology and biogeochemistry.
CEO, Kostas Research Institute and Northeastern University Professor of the Practice, CSSH
781.238.8422
Peter Boynton is CEO of the Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security and Professor of the Practice at Northeastern University. Boynton is a homeland security practitioner who was previously Commissioner of Emergency Management and Homeland Security for the state of Connecticut, an officer in the U.S. Coast Guard, a Federal Security Director for TSA, and Director on the White House National Security Council staff. He holds a master's degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, an engineering degree from the Coast Guard Academy, and an unlimited Master’s License for ocean-going vessels of any tonnage.
Professor
617.373.2381
Holly B. Jimison is a professor in both the College of Computer & Information Science and Bouvé College of Health Science. Prior to joining Northeastern, she was on leave from Oregon Health & Science University to serve as a technology advisor for the Big Data Initiative for Monitoring Health Behaviors at Home and in the Environment at the National Institutes of Health. Her earlier work as medical informatics faculty at OHSU focused on technology for successful aging and scalable remote care. She served on the Executive Board of the Oregon Center for Aging & Technology and was past president of Oregon’s Health Information Management Systems Society chapter. As a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, Professor Jimison has made significant and sustained contributions to the field of biomedical informatics in the areas of pattern recognition, decision support, and consumer health informatics. She continues to deepen her influence in the field through her research on technology for successful aging and scalable remote care for older adults, including models for tailoring interventions in cognitive exercise, physical exercise, socialization, and sleep management using new behavioral metrics derived from this type of data. As the director of the Consortium on Technology for Proactive Care at Northeastern University, she leads a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional effort to facilitate research in the area of home monitoring of health behaviors, including helping researchers address the challenges of big data related to large amounts of complex and noisy streaming data from multiple sources used to infer clinically relevant health behaviors.
Associate Professor
617.373.8344
Dr. Jeanne Madden is Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmacy and Health Systems Sciences, School of Pharmacy, Bouvé College of Health Sciences, at Northeastern University. She received a bachelor’s degree in History from Brown University, a master’s degree from the Harvard School of Public Health, and her doctorate from the Harvard University PhD program in Health Policy.
Dr. Madden’s research primarily concerns access to health care, the burden of costs on patients, and the consequences of health system changes. She has directed several federally-funded studies examining the impact of changes in pharmacy benefits on access to treatments for chronic illness. Dr. Madden is leading a qualitative study to gather perspectives of individuals with bipolar disorder navigating different insurance benefits, and leads stakeholder engagement activities for the PCORI-sponsored parent grant evaluating the impact of high-deductible insurance plans on adolescents and adults with bipolar disorder. In her recent research as part of the Mental Health Research Network, she has led inquiries into the completeness of information in medical record data and the use of psychotropics among children with autism spectrum disorders. She is co-investigator on a study of the impact of FDA warnings about antidepressants and suicidality among youth. Past studies have examined medication underuse and uncontrolled asthma in a commercially-insured population, access to and affordability of medicines in low- and middle-income countries, and maternal and infant outcomes following changes in hospitalization policies at childbirth. Dr. Madden has particular expertise in large datasets, measurement development and validation, and evaluation methods. She holds a secondary faculty appointment at her prior institution, the Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute.
Professor of Political Science, Public Policy and Urban Affairs
Chair, Department of Political Science
Thomas J. Vicino is a professor of political science, public policy and urban affairs. In 2014, Prof. Vicino was a U.S. Fulbright Core Scholar to Brazil, where he was a visiting associate professor of political economy in the Graduate Program in Social Sciences at Pontificia Universidade Catolica (PUC Minas) in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He teaches at the graduate level in the MPA Program and the Master of Urban and Regional Policy (MURP) Program. At the undergraduate level, he teaches in the political science major and the urban studies minor. Prof. Vicino proudly serves as the faculty advisor to two student organizations: College Democrats and Huskies for Alternative Transportation.
Prof. Vicino specializes in the political economy of cities and suburbs, focusing on issues of metropolitan development, housing, and demographic analysis. He is the author of four books, including: Suburban Crossroads: The Fight for Local Control of Immigration Policy (2013) and Transforming Race and Class in Suburbia: Decline in Metropolitan Baltimore (2008) and co-author of Global Migration: The Basics (2014) as well as the bestselling book Cities and Suburbs: New Metropolitan Realities in the US (2010). He has also published numerous book chapters and research articles in peer-reviewed journals.
Professor of Sociology
Professor and Director, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program
617.373.8519
Dr. Suzanna Danuta Walters’ work centers on questions of gender, feminist theory and politics, sexuality, and popular culture and she is a frequent commentator on these issues for the media. Her most recent book, The Tolerance Trap: How God, Genes, and Good Intentions are Sabotaging Gay Equality (NYU Press), explores how notions of tolerance limit the possibilities for real liberation and deep social belonging. This book has been the subject of numerous radio and press interviews and discussions, which can be heard and read on her website www.suzannawalters.com. Walters’ previous book, All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America (University of Chicago Press, 2001), examined the explosion of gay visibility in culture and politics over the past 15 years and raised pressing questions concerning the politics of visibility around sexual identity. The book was a finalist for several literary awards (including the Lambda Literary Award). Her other works include books on feminist cultural theory (Material Girls: Making Sense of Feminist Cultural Theory), mothers and daughters in popular culture (Lives Together/Worlds Apart: Mothers and Daughters in Popular Culture) and numerous articles and book chapters on feminist theory, queer theory and LGBT studies, and popular culture. She is currently working on a book examining the state of both feminist theory and politics in an era of “call-out feminism” and intense social media attention.
Walters also contributes regularly to more public venues and has written for The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the LA Times, and the Baltimore Sun, among others. In 2004, Walters founded the first in the nation Ph.D. program in gender studies at Indiana University, where she was a professor of gender studies and held positions in sociology and communication and culture.
Previously, Walters was professor of sociology and director of women’s studies at Georgetown University. She was also a visiting senior scholar at the Center for Narrative Research at the University of East London. She received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Associate Professor of Architecture
Director, School of Architecture
617.373.4637
Professor, College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University
617.373.5876
Ravi Sundaram’s primary research interests lie in networks and algorithms. He is interested in network performance and approximation algorithms for the design and efficient utilization of networks. He enjoys devising efficient schemes for improving the performance of network based applications and validating their use through innovative systems implementations. He is also interested in network security and game theoretic aspects of network usage. In the past he has worked in complexity theory and combinatorics.
Professor Sundaram joined Northeastern in the fall of 2003 after working as the Director of Engineering at Akamai Technologies, where he played a critical role in the buildout of the world’s leading content delivery network. There he also established the mapping group which is responsible for directing browser requests (over 10 billion/day) to the optimal Akamai server.
Teaching Professor, Business Management
617-470-2046
Francesca Grippa, PhD, is an Associate Teaching Professor and Lead Faculty for the BS in Management at Northeastern University, College of Professional Studies.
Dr Grippa’s research and scholarship interests include: collaborative innovation networks; entrepreneurship and change management; e-mail based social network analysis; promoting collaboration within healthcare teams; building resilient communities of patients, researchers and healthcare providers. Dr Grippa published several papers in peer reviewed journals, including the Journal of Business Research; Computers in Human Behaviors; Knowledge Management Research & Practice; and Social Networks. She co-edited the Springer book “Collaborative Innovation Networks. Building Adaptive and Resilient Organizations” and was guest editor for a special issue on “Collaborative Innovation Networks”, in the International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business.
Dr Grippa is member of a research project at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence that focuses on the application of dynamic network analysis to investigate the diffusion of innovation. She is also part of the Team Science Advisory Board of the European Project GEDII - Gender Diversity Impact, Improving research and innovation through gender diversity. She obtained a PhD in e-Business Management from University of Salento, Italy, and was a visiting scholar at the MIT Center for Digital Business.
Associate Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and Criminology and Criminal Justice
Co-Director, Boston Area Research Initiative
617.373.8900
Dan O’Brien is associate professor in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University, and co-director of the Boston Area Research Initiative. His work focuses on the ways that researchers, policymakers, and practitioners can work together to leverage modern digital data (i.e., “Big Data”) to better understand and serve cities. His own work focuses on the behavioral and social dynamics of urban neighborhoods, particularly those that directly impact a place’s future upward (or downward) trajectory.
Professor of Law, Public Policy and Urban Affairs
617.373.3307
Professor Baker works closely with colleagues in the Northeastern's Global Resilience Institute, linking it to the School of Law's new Center for Law, Innovation and Creativity (CLIC). She teaches courses at the law school and in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities related to her research interests in environmental law and energy law.
Professor Baker served as an Air Force officer prior to her honorable discharge under the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policy, and became a vocal advocate for repeal of the policy. Following her graduation from law school, Baker clerked for Justice Roderick Ireland of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. She also worked as a corporate and project finance associate for Bingham McCutchen LLP, initially in Boston and later in Japan. Professor Baker also completed a William H. Hastie Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin Law School, where she also received her LLM degree. In 2016, she won a Fulbright award and spent a year in Mexico exploring energy reform, climate change and indigenous rights.
Before joining Northeastern's faculty, Professor Baker spent three years as an associate professor of law at the William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawai’i, where she was the founding director of the Energy Justice Program. Prior to that, she served on the faculty at University of San Francisco School of Law.
Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice
Professor Cuevas received his BA from Tufts University and his PhD in clinical psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology at Alliant International University in San Diego, CA. He is currently co-director of the Violence and Justice Research Laboratory. Professor Cuevas’s research interests are in the area of victimization and trauma, sexual violence and sexual offending, family violence, and psychological assessment. Specifically, his work focuses examining victimization among Latinos and how it relates to psychological distress and service utilization, as well as the role cultural factors play on victimization.
In addition, he is studying the impact of psychological factors on the revictimization of children and how it helps explain the connection between victimization and delinquency. His most recent National Institute of Justice-funded research will examine the scope and impact of bias crime against Latinos. Other NIJ-funded collaborations include the development of instruments to evaluate bias victimization among youth and teen dating aggression. Professor Cuevas also continues to engage in clinical work, providing assessment and treatment to victims of abuse and trauma as well as sex offenders.
Assistant Professor in the Department of Marine & Environmental Sciences
Samuel Muñoz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Marine & Environmental Sciences with a cross-appointment in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. He obtained a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he was advised by Jack Williams, and then held a postdoctoral position in the Coastal Systems Group at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. His research uses geological, historical, and numerical approaches to understand environmental variability and its influence on people.
Assistant Professor, School of Architecture
Faculty Affiliate in Civil and Environmental Engineering
617.373.5320
Michelle Laboy is an Assistant Professor of Architecture, with an Affiliate appointment in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. Her research and teaching explore interdisciplinary design approaches to engage architecture in the creation of a sustainable and resilient urban landscape, with a particular focus on how buildings’ site and structural strategies enable adaptation to changing climatological, ecological and cultural environments.
Michelle’s design research received grants from Autodesk and the Boston Groundwater Trust to design systems to visualize the varying water table in the city of Boston and the effects of localized recharge strategies in individual building sites in the last decade. As draw-down of groundwater in the urban environment threatens wood foundations of historic buildings, and low stormwater retention in building sites increases the vulnerabilities to urban coastal and riverine ecologies, her work will make the real-time monitoring of groundwater in public space a valuable tool to evaluate impacts and engage the public in implementing solutions. Michelle is Co-PI on a current project titled Future-Use Architecture: Design for Persistent Change, which received the 2017 Latrobe Prize of the AIA College of Fellows. She is part of an interdisciplinary team developing a tool that makes information on sustainability and resilience of the existing urban fabric accessible to homeowners and tenants, funded by the AIA Upjohn Research Initiative. Her recent scholarship has been published in The Plan Journal, Enquiry: the ARCC Journal, and the Journal of Architectural Education.
Michelle has Master degrees in Architecture and Urban Planning from the University of Michigan; and a B.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Puerto Rico. She co-founded FieLDworkshop, a research-based design practice in Boston, to explore how smaller scale design contributes to conditions of urban resilience and sustainability at larger scales. Prior to coming to Northeastern, Michelle worked as a licensed engineer and architectural designer in San Juan, Detroit, Barcelona, Chicago and Cambridge. Her professional experience includes transportation and urban design, building design for commercial, educational and residential projects, and water-sensing installations in public space.
Director of University Honors Programs
Professor of Applied Psychology
Laurie Kramer is Professor of Applied Psychology and Director of the University Honors Program at Northeastern University. She is also a Licensed Clinical Psychologist in the State of Illinois. Dr. Kramer received her B.S in Psychology from Stony Brook University in 1976 and her M.S. in Psychology from Long Island University in 1979. She earned her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Illinois in 1989 and performed her residency at Northwestern University Medical School and the Family Institute of Chicago.
Dr. Kramer’s research focuses on the mechanisms by which young children can develop positive relationships with their siblings and her findings have been widely cited in the New York Times, Time magazine, USA Today, MS-NBC, the Today Show, as well as in many popular press books, magazines and newspapers nationwide. Dr. Kramer is the creator of the evidence-based Fun with Sisters and Brothers Program and the More Fun with Sisters and Brothers Program, preventive interventions that have been demonstrated to be effective in improving the sibling relationships of young children.
Dr. Kramer was the founding Director of the Family Resiliency Center and The Pampered Chef Family Resiliency Program at the University of Illinois, initiatives which are aimed at enhancing the well-being of children, youth, and families through multidisciplinary research, education and outreach.
Dr. Kramer served as the Associate Dean for Academic Programs in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at the University of Illinois between 2007 and 2016. Her excellence in teaching has been recognized nationally with the USDA Food and Agriculture Sciences Excellence in College and University Teaching Award, the Medallion of Honor Award from the Mom’s Association of the University of Illinois and the Distinguished Educator Award from the North American Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture organization.
Professor & Director of the Center for Cognitive & Brain Health
Art Kramer is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for Cognitive & Brain Health at Northeastern University. He previously served as Senior Vice Provost for Research and Graduate Education at Northeastern University. He also previously served as the Director of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science & Technology and the Swanlund Chair and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Illinois.
He received his Ph.D. in Cognitive/Experimental Psychology from the University of Illinois. Professor Kramer’s research projects include topics in Aging, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Human Factors.
A major focus of his labs recent research is the understanding and enhancement of cognitive and neural plasticity across the lifespan. He is a former Associate Editor of Perception and Psychophysics and is currently a member of six editorial boards. Professor Kramer is also a fellow of the American Psychological Association, American Psychological Society, a former member of the executive committee of the International Society of Attention and Performance, and a recipient of a NIH Ten Year MERIT Award.
He has recently served on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology (PCAST), the National Academy of Medicine’s (NAM) committee on Cognitive Aging, the Chair of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) workshop on Understanding Pathways to Successful Aging: Behavioral and Social Factors Related to Alzheimer’s Disease, the Global Council on Brain Health, and a multitude of other national and international committees. Professor Kramer’s research has been featured in a long list of print, radio and electronic media including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Chicago Tribune, CBS Evening News, Today Show, National Public Radio and Saturday Night Live.
Assistant Professor of Biology
617.373.6581
Dr. Crane is an Assistant Professor of Biology at Northeastern University. In 2013, Dr. Crane obtained his PhD in Aging and Cellular Metabolism from McMaster University in Canada. In 2015, he completed his post-doctoral involving Obesity and Diabetes research, also at McMaster University. He was then recruited to Northeastern University under their Healthy Aging Initiative, joining several faculty that study aging and regenerative biology. Dr. Crane studies fundamental cellular mechanisms of aging in mammalian cells and tissues, with a focus on skin, connective and muscle tissue. Dr. Crane is a member of Northeastern’s Biology PhD program.
Clinical Professor, Center for Health Policy and Law, Department of Health Sciences
Professor Mohammed is a faculty member in the Department of Health Sciences at Northeastern University. He directs the Master of Public Health Program in Urban Health and oversees the program in areas of educational policy development, curricular design, public health workforce development and recruitment/outreach to public health professionals. The graduate program is committed to addressing a variety of urban health issues through inter-professional engagement. Dr. Mohammed also directs Inter-professional Research, Education and Practice Initiatives for Bouvé College of Health Sciences. He is a board-certified family medicine physician and fellow of the American Association of Family Physicians who has been involved in competency-based curricular design, implementation and evaluation for the past 11 years. He also completed a three year Robert Wood Johnson Foundation “Developing Leadership in Reducing Substance Abuse” Fellowship worked as a Co-Investigator on a Center for Substance Abuse Prevention funded grant “Substance Abuse and HIV Prevention in African-American Families” which focused on training of primary care providers in community health centers on brief interventions to improve parenting skills and reduce risky adolescent behavior. Before joining Northeastern in 2007, Professor Mohammed served on the faculty of the Department of Family Medicine and the Department of Epidemiology and Bio-statistics in the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
Assistant Professor, Department of Marine & Environmental Sciences
781.581.7370
Steven Scyphers is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Northeastern University. Prior to his current position, Steven was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Northeastern and was awarded a Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.
After earning a BS in Marine Biology at Auburn University, he completed his PhD at the University of South Alabama and Dauphin Island Sea Lab. Steven’s research integrates ecology and sociology to understand and develop strategies to overcome major challenges facing coastal communities. This work has included projects on sustainable shoreline development, coastal fisheries, ecosystem restoration, and mitigating the impacts of disasters.
University Distinguished Professor
Sheila M. Puffer is University Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University, Boston, USA, where she is a professor of international business at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business. She is also a fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, and has served as program director of the Gorbachev Foundation of North America. In 2015 she was a visiting research professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University where she studied entrepreneurs and other technical professionals from the former Soviet Union. Her latest coauthored book, Hammer & Silicon: The Soviet Diaspora in the US Innovation Economy, was published by Cambridge University Press in June 2018. Her latest publications on resilience and sustainability include The End of Sand: Confronting One of the Greatest Environmental Challenges of the New Millennium, and Mining and Corporate Social Responsibility: Scotbar Proprietary Limited. She has developed MBA courses on sustainable practices in the workplace.
Dr. Puffer has been recognized as the #1 scholar internationally in business and management in Russia, the former Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe according to a 2005 Journal of International Business Studies article analyzing 13 leading academic journals from 1986-2003. She also ranks as the #1 most published author (tied with coauthor D. McCarthy) in the Journal of World Business from 1993-2003. She has been ranked in the top 5 percent of authors worldwide who published in the leading international business journals from 1996-2005, according to a Michigan State University study. She was also ranked among the top 100 authors who published in Administrative Science Quarterly from 1981-2001. Dr. Puffer has more than 160 publications, including over 80 refereed articles and 11 books. She served as the editor of The Academy of Management Executive as well as a member of the Academy’s Board of Governors from 1999-2002. She worked for six years as an administrator in the Government of Canada and has consulted for a number of private and nonprofit organizations. Dr. Puffer earned a diploma from the executive management program at the Plekhanov Institute of the National Economy in Moscow, and holds BA (Slavic Studies) and MBA degrees from the University of Ottawa, Canada, and a PhD in business administration from the University of California, Berkeley.
Professor of Political Science, Public Policy and Urban Affairs
Director, Masters Program in Security and Resilience, Northeastern University
617.373.8189
Daniel P. Aldrich is professor and director of the Security and Resilience Program at Northeastern University. He has published four books, more than 40 peer reviewed articles, and written op-eds for The New York Times, CNN, Asahi Shinbun, along with appearing on popular media outlets such as CNBC, MSNBC, NPR, and HuffPost. His research has been funded by the Fulbright Foundation, the Abe Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, and he has carried out more than five years of fieldwork in Japan, India, Africa, and the Gulf Coast.
Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs
Risa Kitagawa is assistant professor of political science and international affairs at Northeastern University. Her research interests include the politics of transitional justice, state violence, post-conflict processes, and human rights, with a regional focus on Central America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Her current book project uses econometric and experimental methods to investigate transitional justice policymaking and its impact on reconciliation in societies recovering from large-scale violence. A second strand of her research focuses on the role of new information and communication technologies (ICT) in promoting social wellbeing among communities affected by violence.
She holds a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University (2017) with specializations in comparative politics, political theory, and methodology, and a B.A. in international relations and French from New York University (2009). Prior to joining Northeastern, she was postdoctoral research scholar in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University.
Director of the Institute for Security and Public Policy
Principal Research Scientist for the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice
617.373.3702
Glenn Pierce, Ph.D. is the Director of the Institute for Security and Public Policy (ISPP) and a Principal Research Scientist for the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Northeastern University. At Northeastern University he has also served as Director of Strategic Planning and Research for Information Services, Director of Academic Computing, and Director for the Center Applied Social Research.
As Director of Academic Computing he was one of the leaders in planning and implementing Northeastern University’s institution-wide computer network, the development of a centralized computer support services, and the university-wide delivery of software applications and other network services. Dr. Pierce has conducted research on a broad range of social and economic issues and has obtained funding for his research from a variety of agencies including the National Institute of Justice, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology program.
His most recent research has focused on firearms violence, counter proliferation of dual use technologies and weapons of mass destruction, criminal justice information and intelligence systems, and intergroup conflict.
Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Experiential Education
617.373.8921
Professor Davis teaches Constitutional Law, US Human Rights Advocacy and Professional Responsibility. She is a faculty director for the law school’s Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy and the NuLawLab. In 2015-2016, she held the Fulbright distinguished chair in human rights and humanitarian law at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute, Lund University, in Lund, Sweden, and she remains an affiliated scholar with the institute. She is also a member of the expert pool for WaterLex, a Geneva-based development organization that advocates for water and human rights.
Professor Davis has written widely on human rights, women’s rights, and social justice issues. She is co-author of the first law school textbook focused on domestic human rights: Human Rights Advocacy in the United States (West 2014) and she co-edited Bringing Human Rights Home, a three-volume work chronicling the US human rights movement. In 2008, Bringing Human Rights Home was named one of the “best books in the field of human rights” by the US Human Rights Network. Professor Davis’s book, Brutal Need: Lawyers and the Welfare Rights Movement, received the Reginald Heber Smith Award for distinguished scholarship on the subject of equal access to justice, and was also honored by the American Bar Association in its annual Silver Gavel competition.
Professor Davis’ articles have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the North Carolina Law Review, Fordham Law Review and many others. Her most recent book is Global Urban Justice: The Rise of Human Rights Cities, in which she and her co-editors bring together academics and practitioners at the forefront of human rights cities and the “right to the city” movement to critically discuss the potential that human rights cities hold for global urban justice.
In addition to serving as an editor, Professor Davis contributed a chapter, “Cities, Human Rights and Accountability: The United States Experience.” Professor Davis co-edits the Law Professors’ Network Human Rights at Home blog. Prior to joining the law faculty in 2002, Professor Davis was vice president and legal director for the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. As a women’s rights practitioner, she was counsel in a number of cases before the US Supreme Court, including Nguyen v. INS, a challenge to sex-based citizenship laws that Professor Davis argued before the court.
Professor Davis has also served as a fellow at the Bunting Institute, as the first Kate Stoneman Visiting Professor of Law and Democracy at Albany Law School, a Soros Reproductive Rights Fellow, a fellow at the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School and fellow of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Professor Davis is an appointed member of the Massachusetts State Advisory Committee of the US Commission on Civil Rights
Assistant Professor, jointly appointed in Civil & Environmental Engineering and Marine & Environmental Sciences
617.373.8131
Dr. Mueller is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in the departments of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Marine & Environmental Sciences. Work in the Environmental Sensors Lab builds on Dr. Mueller’s prior research at MIT’s Parsons Laboratory for Environmental Science and Engineering and the University of Washington’s Department of Oceanography.
Dr. Mueller's research and scholarship interests include: Biogeochemistry of natural and engineered systems; in-situ sensors and instrumentation for high-resolution process characterization; remediation and sustainability in natural and built coastal environments; sensor-driven closed-loop controls for resource optimization in engineered systems; signal processing and machine learning, embedded systems, and sensor networks.
She obtained her PhD degree in Environmental Chemistry from MIT.
Associate Professor
Director, PhD Program in Population Health
Professor Molnar is a social and psychiatric epidemiologist and an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Sciences. She is also the Director of the Population Health PhD Program at Northeastern University. Dr. Molnar’s research is grounded in three public health domains: social epidemiology, prevention science, and psychiatric epidemiology. Studies focus on two major areas: (1) violent, traumatic experiences (such as child maltreatment, sexual violence, community violence) and the ways that they affect children, youth and those who respond to those who experience violence, i.e. vicarious trauma; and (2) the social context of high-risk behaviors among adolescents (the latter often being sequelae of the first.) One main area of Dr. Molnar’s expertise is multilevel methods, where she utilizes neighborhood-level analyses for insight into both etiology and prevention strategies. Another main area of expertise is community-based participatory research methodology, from systematic needs assessments to multilevel research designs, to survey/measures development, to evaluation research, to implementation, to analyses and dissemination. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, Dr. Molnar’s work, strongly influenced by Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological Theory of Human Development, has focused on identifying neighborhood-level resources that can be mobilized to decrease levels of violence both in families and in communities. Current projects on which she is the Principal Investigator include the Vicarious Trauma Toolkit project funded by the Office for Victims of Crime; evaluation of three different federally funded interventions to prevent social emotional and behavioral disorders among young children; an NIH-funded evaluation study of Start Strong Boston, a middle school age dating violence preventive intervention delivered in after school programs; and a Tier 1 study of the role of justice in healing from sexual assault. Prior to joining Northeastern, Dr. Molnar was an Associate Professor of Society, Human Development and Health at the Harvard School of Public Health where she co-founded the Boston Data Project at the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center, where ongoing surveillance of youth violence and its risk and protective factors has been done since 2004. These efforts have involved active collaborations with the Boston Public Health Commission, the MA Department of Public Health, Boston Public Schools, national organizations representing first responders and victim services providers, the Boston Police Department, among others. Outside of Northeastern, Dr. Molnar is the Board President of the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, a non-profit with a mission to end sexual violence through healing and social justice.
Associate Professor
College of Engineering Faculty Fellow
IEEE Fellow
Director of Research, PAWR Project Office
617.373.4159
Tommaso Melodia (M’07) received the “Laurea” and Doctorate degrees in telecommunications engineering from the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” Rome, Italy, in 2001 and 2005, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA, in 2007.
Between 2007 and 2014 he was an Assistant and then Associate Professor at SUNY Buffalo. In 2014, he joined Northeastern University as an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His current research interests are in modeling, optimization, and experimental evaluation of wireless networks, with applications to intra-body networks of implantable devices, tactical cognitive radio networks, multimedia sensor networks, and underwater networks.
Prof. Melodia serves in the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, and Computer Networks (Elsevier). He received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and he coauthored a paper that was recognized as the Fast Breaking Paper in the field of Computer Science by Thomson ISI Essential Science Indicators and a paper that received an Elsevier Top Cited Paper Award.
Assistant Professor
Aanjhan is an Assistant Professor in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University in Boston, USA, since January 2018. Professor Aanjhan is interested in building secure autonomous cyber-physical systems and has worked on a wide variety of topics including physical-layer security of wireless systems, secure localization and proximity verification, trusted computing architectures, and side-channels. He is a recipient of several awards including the outstanding dissertation award from ETH Zurich, regional winner of European Space Agency’s Satellite Navigation competition and the Cyber Award from Armasuisse (Switzerland’s Department of Defense). Prior to joining Northeastern, he was a senior researcher in the System Security group at ETH Zurich and has over 3 years of industry research experience as a senior engineer at Robert Bosch GmbH’s Car Multimedia Division “Blaupunkt” where he was involved in the development of embedded modules for top automotive manufacturers including Audi and Volkswagen. He holds an M.Sc with specialization in Electronics and Microelectronics from EPFL, Switzerland and a Ph.D in Computer Science from ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering/Marine and Environmental Sciences
617.373.5465
Dr. Q. Jim Chen is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering/Marine and Environmental Sciences at Northeastern University (NEU). He conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Delaware’s Center for Applied Coastal Research, and doctoral research at Old Dominion University and Danish Hydraulic Institute. Dr. Chen specializes in the development and application of numerical models for coastal dynamics, including ocean waves, coastal and estuarine circulation, wave-structure interactions and sediment transport. His research includes field experiments and application of remote sensing and highperformance computing technologies to solve engineering problems. Dr. Chen has secured over $13.9 million of federal research grants, and more than $1.2 million of research contracts from the state and industry. His federal grants include the NSF CAREER award and five NSF collaborative awards to support interdisciplinary research. He has published more than 70 manuscripts in technical journals, 5 book chapters and 35 conference papers. The impact of his research on coastal engineering and science is reflected in more than 3190 Google Scholar citations of his publications. Dr. Chen serves as an Associate Editor for two American Society of Civil Engineers journals and on the editorial board of an international journal. Prior to joining NEU in 2108, he served as Associate Director of the Coastal Studies Institute, and Head of Coast to Cosmo in the Center for Computation and Technology at Louisiana State University (LSU). He also serves on the LSU Council on Research and the Louisiana Water Resources Research Institute Advisory Board.
Assistant Professor
Graduate Programs Advisor
John Wihbey is an assistant professor of journalism and media innovation at the Northeastern University School of Journalism, where he serves as the head of graduate programs. He is a faculty affiliate with the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks and serves as a board member for Project Information Literacy. His forthcoming book is Knowledge and the News: The Future of Journalism in a Networked World (The MIT Press). Previously, he was a lecturer at Boston University and an assistant director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. He is a former reporter, radio producer, and digital editor, with a specialty in issues of energy, climate change, and sustainability.
John has published commentaries and articles in media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, USA Today, Pacific Standard, National Geographic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nieman Journalism Lab, and Yale Climate Connections. His research has been published in Journalism Practice, Journal of the International Symposium on Online Journalism, and Oxford Research Encyclopedias.
Assistant Professor, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
617.373.2275
Md. Noor-E-Alam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the Northeastern University. Prior to his current role, he was working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, affiliated with Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Operations Research Center (ORC), and Sloan School of Management. He has completed his PhD in Engineering Management in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Alberta (UofA) in 2013. His current research interests lie in the intersection of operations research and data analytics, particularly as applied to healthcare, manufacturing systems and supply chain. Before coming to the UofA, he served as a faculty member (first as a Lecturer and then as an Assistant Professor) in the Department of Industrial and Production Engineering at Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology (BUET). He also previously received a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Industrial and Production Engineering from BUET.
Assistant Professor, Architecture
617.373.2641
David Fannon is an architect and building scientist whose work integrates research, analysis, and design to provide occupant comfort and wellbeing in long-lasting, low-resource consuming buildings. He holds a joint appointment in the School of Architecture and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
David has held positions at international engineering, architecture, A/E and specialty consulting firms, where he contributed to a range of new construction, renovation and historic restoration projects for government, higher-education and commercial clients. He has conducted research in academic and professional settings, consulted on strategic planning and change management and performed simulation and analysis for a range of high-performance buildings.
David earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a Masters from University of California Berkeley, and is a registered architect in the State of New York. He is a member of ASHRAE and a LEED Accredited Professional with a Building Design and Construction specialty
Associate Professor
617.373.4211
Abhi Shelat joins Northeastern University’s College of Computer and Information Science after serving as an associate professor at the University of Virginia’s computer science department.
Abhi grew up in Austin, Texas, where his father worked after earning his MBA from Northeastern in May of 1975. Abhi is very happy to join his father’s alma matter this Fall. Abhi earned a BA from Harvard in 1997, before moving to San Francisco to work at a startup. He earned his PhD in cryptography from MIT in 2005 and joined the Zurich IBM Research Lab shortly after. Abhi then joined the computer science department at the University of Virginia in 2007. He was promoted and tenured from an assistant professor to an associate professor in 2013.
Abhi has received the NSF CAREER award, Microsoft Faculty Fellowship Award, the FEST fellowship award, an Amazon Research award, an SAIC research award, a Jacobs Future of Money Workshop research prize, the Google Faculty Research Award, and an ACM UVA-chapter Professor of the Year award. Abhi is also co-founder of a software company, Arqspin, in Charlottesville that now operates itself.
His research interests lie in cryptography and applied security. Abhi works on secure computation protocols, which are methods for mutually distrusting parties, each with private inputs, to jointly compute a function while ensuring maximal privacy and correctness.
Abhi has three energetic children with his partner and acclaimed architectural historian, Cammy Brothers (also joining Northeastern).
Associate Professor, International Business & Strategy. Associate Fellow, Center for Emerging Markets.
617.373.4604
Luis Dau is an Associate Professor of International Business and Strategy at Northeastern's D’Amore-McKim School of Business and an Associate Fellow at the Center for Emerging Markets. His research and teaching interests include global strategy, emerging market firms, institutional changes, pro-market reforms, business groups, family firms, firm performance, international corporate social responsibility, sustainability, formal and informal entrepreneurship, and culture.
Dau received his PhD in International Business/Strategy from the University of South Carolina. He was named a John H. Dunning Visiting Fellow for the 2016/17 academic year, hosted by the John H. Dunning Centre for International Business at the Henley Business School, University of Reading.
Professor
Associate Dean & Director - Undergraduate Programs
617.373.7069
Alan Mislove is an Associate Professor and Associate Dean and Director of Undergraduate Programs at the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University, which he joined in 2009. He received his B.A., M.S., and Ph.D. in computer science from Rice University in 2002, 2005, and 2009, respectively.
Prof. Mislove’s research concerns distributed systems and networks, with a focus on using social networks to enhance the security, privacy, and efficiency of newly emerging systems. He work comprises over 50 peer-reviewed papers, has received over 10,000 citations, and has been supported by over $5M in grants from government agencies and industrial partners. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award (2011), a Google Faculty Award (2012), the ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award (2017), the USENIX Security Distinguished Paper Award (2017), the NDSS Distinguished Paper Award (2018), the IEEE Cybersecurity Award for Innovation (2017), and his work has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the CBS Evening News.
Assistant Teaching Professor Corporate and Organizational Communication Graduate Program
Faculty Lead for Cross-Cultural Communication
Faculty Academic Council – Member-at-Large
Dr. Patricia Goodman is a Teaching Faculty at Northeastern University College of Professional Studies Graduate Corporate and Organizational Communications and Faculty Lead for Cross-cultural Communication. Her core professional career ranges from leadership roles within the social service field from education to judicial services and mental health. Her formal education includes a Doctorate in Education from George Washington University through the Executive Leadership Program with a concentration in adult learning and graduate program in Management of Information Systems at Harvard University. Dr. Goodman is also the Principal Coach for P.A.G. Coaching & Associates, facilitating professional development training and counsel for nonprofit leaders, and professional speaking training. Dr. Goodman’s research focus has been in the areas of cross-cultural communication, self-directed learning, team learning, and transformative learning. Additionally, Dr. Goodman is collaborating on two research projects. One focused on cultural awareness seeking to explore global mindset and support community resilience. The other study is related to cultural transformative learning through an information and communication technology (ICT) tool.
Assistant Professor at Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Associate Director of Research on Social Media at Boston Area Research Initiative
617.373.7984
I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Northeastern University and the Associate Research Director of the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI), Harvard University. I study the interplay between urban informatics and urban, infrastructure, and social resilience. My research focuses on two interrelated areas: human movement perturbation under the influence of natural and manmade disasters (collaborating with Georgia Tech and Virginia Tech), and geosocial networks in big cities (collaborating with Harvard University). The study of New Yorkers' mobility during Hurricane Sandy is reported by CityLab, from The Atlantic.
Before joining in Northeastern, I was a postdoc fellow at the Department of Sociology, Harvard University. There, I found my research interests in studying social inequality and segregation using the "big data" from Twitter by working with Prof. Robert Sampson and Mario Small. I received my Ph.D. degree from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech. My advisor was Prof. John Taylor, director of the Network Dynamics lab. During my time at Virginia Tech, I was also the first Ph.D. Fellow at BioBuild, an interdisciplinary program, and a Via Teaching Fellow. I obtained my M.S. in Construction Management from Michigan State University and B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Tianjin University (China).
Associate Professor for Supply Chain and Information Management
Supply Chain and Information Management Group Chair
Dr. Lee's research areas include data and information quality; IT-mediated institutional learning and problem-solving; systems and data integration; enterprise architecture; and healthcare information and medical errors. She has taught Information Quality courses for honors students ("Information Quality: Technology and Philosophy") and MBA students ("Information Quality for Global Managers"), and various MIS courses, such as, "Telecommunications and Networks," "Information Resource Management" for MBA and undergraduate students at Northeastern University. She has also taught "eIntegration: Strategy, Technology, and Organizations" for MBA and undergraduate students at MIT, and various Information Quality courses for executives at MIT, UC Berkeley, and at many other institutions globally.
Professor Lee was a visiting assistant professor at MIT. She was Associate Director of Total Data Quality Program at MIT, and Research Associate at MIT. She was a co-founder of the International Conference on Information Quality (ICIQ) and the Cambridge Research Group. Professor Lee has provided consultation for many companies and agencies in private and public sectors in the US and internationally for over 20 years. Many concepts, frameworks, techniques, and software applications produced from her research and industry practice over years are used and applied in practice.
Professor Lee is a founding and current editor-in chief for the ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality. She is on editorial board of Journal of Database Management, Information and Management and a reviewer for leading journals in the MIS area. She has served as conference chair, program chair, track chair, session chair for many conferences in information systems area. Currently, she is also an adviser for PhD and Graduate Program in Information Quality at University of Arkansas, Little Rock.Yang Lee is the recipient of the prestigious 2012 Academic Achievement Award, the 2012 Data Management Hall of Famer, from the Data Management Association International (DAMAI) for her theoretical contribution and work as a thought leader in the field of Data Quality.
Dr. Hillman received his doctorate from the University of Maryland in 2000, and then began his career on the faculty at the University of Illinois, where he was a Professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Community Health for 16 years. He continued his career at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, where he currently holds appointments in the Department of Psychology and the Department of Health Sciences. He directs the new Center for Cognitive and Brain Health, which has the mission of understanding the role of health behaviors on brain and cognition to maximize health and well-being, and promote the effective functioning of individuals across the lifespan. Dr. Hillman has published more than 170 refereed journal articles, 10 book chapters, and co-edited a text entitled Functional Neuroimaging in Exercise and Sport Sciences. He has served on an Institute of Medicine of the National Academies committee entitled Educating the Student Body: Taking Physical Activity and Physical Education to School, and is currently a member of the 2018 Health and Human Services Physical Activity Guidelines for American’s Advisory Committee. His work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), and several private sponsors. Finally, his work has been featured in the media including: CNN, National Public Radio, Good Morning America, Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times.
Prof. Hillman is a joint appointment between the College of Science and the Bouvé College of Health Sciences.
D'Amore-McKim School of Business
s.bhimani@northeastern.edu
Dr. Bhimani researches supply chain risk management and corporate social responsibility (CSR). He focuses on forced labor in corporate supply chains, human trafficking, and supply chain disruption. He has taught at multiple top-tier universities for Ph.D., MBA and undergraduate students on the subjects of supply chain sustainability, supply chain foundations, and supply chain optimization.
Prior to joining academia, Dr. Bhimani held multiple positions in the global supply chain division of a leading Fortune-500 company. He has worked, researched, volunteered and taught in North America, Europe, Africa, and East Asia. Dr. Bhimani has also helped establish a supply chain start-up and consulted for the U.S. Department of Energy.
Dr. Bhimani regularly presents his research at leading supply chain conferences including INFORMS, POMS, and DSI. In 2019, he was awarded the title of Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy for his investment in improving the teaching practice. He volunteers his time for local community needs including Habitat for Humanity, the United Way, Junior Achievement and poverty alleviation programs. He has helped organize non-profit programs for youth education and toward building capacity for social entrepreneurship.
Distinguished Professor, Public Policy and Urban Affairs
Director, Kitty and Michael Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy
Ted Landsmark is distinguished professor and director of the Kitty and Michael Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at Northeastern University. He holds a Ph.D. in American and New England studies from Boston University, and professional degrees in law, and environmental design from Yale University.
As Mayor Martin J. Walsh’s first appointment to the Boston Planning and Development Agency’s Board of Directors, he has brought to the board a wealth of expertise in architecture, urban design, civic leadership, architectural and construction law, and community advocacy. During his seventeen-year tenure as president and CEO of the Boston Architectural College, Dr. Landsmark led the growth of the school from a center into an internationally recognized, multi-disciplinary institution. In August 2014, he was named president emeritus of the college. Landsmark has served as academic vice president of the American College of the Building Arts in Charleston, South Carolina, and as a faculty member and administrator at the Massachusetts College of Art, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and UMass Boston. He has also served as a trustee or board member for many non-profit organizations, including: the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, American Architectural Foundation, the Design Futures Council, The Boston Society of Architects, Historic New England, and Historic Boston. He was also president of the National Architectural Accrediting Board, and the Association of the Collegiate School of Architects.
His research and practice interests include diversity in design, environmental design, design education, higher education administration, community-based economic development, historic preservation, and African American art and artisanry.
Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education and Professor of Health Sciences, Bouve College of Health Sciences
617.373.5543
Dr. Sceppa’s program of research addresses three main areas of aging and health promotion. These include: (1) assessing the efficacy of nutrition and physical activity/exercise interventions on chronic disease risk factors and health outcomes; (2) translating evidence based lifestyle interventions into ‘real world’ settings; and (3) developing sustainable strategies to promote health and reduce the burden of chronic diseases.
Dr. Sceppa’s translational research contributes to our understanding of the role of exercise, physical activity, and healthy foods to counteract physical and psychosocial stressors associated with the onset of chronic conditions and disability in older adults (including the spectrum from acquisition of risk factors and pathology, impairment and functional limitations, to disease, disability, and poor quality of life). Dr. Sceppa’s multidisciplinary research helps develop, evaluate and disseminate effective lifestyle health promotion interventions that contribute to managing and promoting the health of underserved communities and populations. Dr. Sceppa is an active member of the American Society for Nutrition, the Gerontological Society of America, and the American College of Sports Medicine.
Associate Professor and Associate Chair for Research, Civil and Environmental Engineering
617.373.4256
Matthew Eckelman is an Associate Professor at Northeastern University in Civil and Environmental Engineering, with a secondary appointment in Chemical Engineering. His research & scholarship interests include: Environmental engineering and sustainability; life cycle assessment; energy efficiency and emissions modeling; environmental assessment of bio and nanomaterials; material and energy use in urban buildings and infrastructure.
Dr. Eckelman holds a B.A. in Physics and Mathematics from Amherst College and a doctorate in Environmental Engineering from Yale University
Professor of Health Sciences and Sociology
Director, Institute of Urban Health Research and Practice
617.373.3485
Dr. Alisa K. Lincoln joined the IUHRP as an Associate Director, where she oversees the development of a Mental Health Research Program. She has been actively involved in conducting public mental health research for more than a decade and has received more than four million dollars in federal research funds.
Dr. Lincoln completed an NIMH pre-doctoral Fellowship in Psychiatric Epidemiology, and was an NIMH-funded Public Academic Liaison (PAL) Fellow through the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors (NASMHPD) training grant. Her training in Mental Health Services Research continued with the “Mentoring for Mental Health Services Research” NIMH R25. Dr. Lincoln’s research contributes to our knowledge about disparities in mental health and mental health care and focuses on the ways in which social factors and system level factors inter-relate to perpetuate these disparities.
Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
617.373.7328
Y. Raymond Fu received the B.Eng. degree in information engineering and the M.Eng. degree in pattern recognition and intelligence systems from Xi’an Jiaotong University, China, respectively, and the M.S. degree in statistics and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, respectively. He is an interdisciplinary faculty member affiliated with College of Engineering and the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University since 2012. His research interests are Machine Learning, Computational Intelligence, Big Data Mining, Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, and Cyber-Physical Systems.
He has extensive publications in leading journals, books/book chapters and international conferences/workshops. He serves as associate editor, chairs, PC member and reviewer of many top journals and international conferences/workshops. He received seven Prestigious Young Investigator Awards from NAE, ONR, ARO, IEEE, INNS, UIUC, Grainger Foundation; nine Best Paper Awards from IEEE, IAPR, SPIE, SIAM; many major Industrial Research Awards from Google, Samsung, and Adobe, etc. He is currently an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Leaning Systems (TNNLS). He is fellow of IAPR and SPIE, a Lifetime Senior Member of ACM, Lifetime Member of AAAI, OSA, and Institute of Mathematical Statistics, member of Global Young Academy (GYA), INNS and Beckman Graduate Fellow during 2007-2008.
Assistant Professor, Architecture
617.373.4564
Ang Li is an architect and Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture at Northeastern University. Alongside her teaching she maintains a collaborative design practice that works through material experiments and built interventions to explore the role of reference and reuse in contemporary architectural production. Her most current research examines the latent design opportunities that arise out of architectural obsolescence from radical approaches to preservation and adaptive reuse to the emerging second-hand material economies of demolition practices.
Ang has participated in exhibitions at the Echo Art Fair in Buffalo, New York, the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale, and Storefront for Art and Architecture. Her writing and work has been published in Log, Clog, Thresholds, Manifest, Abitare, Wired, and Blueprint. Before joining the faculty at Northeastern she was a Visiting Artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the 2015-16 Peter Reyner Banham Fellow at the University at Buffalo. She holds a BA in architecture from the University of Cambridge, and a M.Arch. from Princeton University, where she also served as an editor of Pidgin Magazine. Previously, she worked for number of architectural offices in the US and internationally, including Adjaye Associates (New York) and Allies and Morrison Architects (London).
Professor of Sociology, Director of International Affairs
617.373.4137
Berna Turam, the Director of International Affairs, is a professor of sociology at Northeastern University. She has an abiding interest in conducting research on state-society interaction, particularly on the interaction between ordinary Muslim people and the state. Her most recent work explored the interplay between the government and contested urban space. Her ethnography in Istanbul and Berlin revealed and analyzed the ways in which contested urban space generated democratic practices and freedoms that facilitate inclusion and democratic accommodation.
By gendering political and spatial processes of inclusion and exclusion, she also does intersectional analysis of religion, space and gender. She is the author of Between Islam and the State: The Politics of Engagement (Stanford University Press, 2007), and Gaining Freedoms: Claiming Space in Istanbul and Berlin (Stanford University Press, 2015) and the editor of Secular State and Religious Society: Two Forces at Play in Turkey (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) In addition, she published articles in journals including British Journal of Sociology, International Journal of Urban and Regional Studies, Nations and Nationalism, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Contemporary Islam and Journal of Democracy. She co-edited a special issue, entitled “Secular Muslims?” in Comparative Studies of South America, Africa and the Middle East. Her article, entitled “Primacy of Space in Politics: Bargaining Space, Power and Freedom in an Istanbul neighborhood,” won the best article award from the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research in 2013.
Over the course of 2016, she was awarded two fellowships at London School of Economics and at Cosmopolis Department of Geography at Vrije University in Brussels. Currently, Turam serves on the advisory board of the project entitled “Understanding the Perceptions of Science in Muslim Societies.” She is also the Co-PI of a newly funded collaborative project on sanctuary cities and safe places.
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