Annual Report
2024-2025
This past year, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering has advanced critical technologies shaping the future of society. From major research initiatives in cybersecurity, communications, and sustainable energy, to students receiving top honors in national and international competitions, we are proud of the impact our department continues to make.
I invite you to explore our digital annual report, where you’ll find more stories of discovery, collaboration, and innovation — along with key statistics that capture the breadth of our accomplishments in 2024–2025.
Thank you for your continued support of the College of Engineering and the incredible work happening here at Northeastern.
Edmund Yeh
Chair, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Top Stories
Eduardo Sontag, university distinguished professor of ECE/BioE, was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Membership is a mark of excellence in science and one of the highest honors that a scientist can receive.
Yonina Eldar joined the electrical and computer engineering department in August 2025 as a Professor and Joseph E. Aoun Chair. Her research interests include medical imaging, sampling methods and A/D design, compressed sensing, deep learning and graphs, communication, radar and remote sensing, signal and image processing for optics, computational biology, detection and estimation theory, optimization for signal processing.
ECE Associate Professor Aatmesh Shrivastava has been awarded the highly selective DARPA Director’s Fellowship Award. This elite recognition goes to top performers of DARPA’s Young Faculty Award program, which Shrivastava received previously for “Nano-Watt Power Machine-Learning Hardware Using Precision Analog Computing.” This year, Shrivastava stood among only 12 recipients nationwide across all disciplines, underscoring his exceptional contributions to cutting-edge research. Shrivastava was also selected by the Boston Intellectual Property Law Association (BIPLA) to be honored at their 14th Annual Invented Here! celebration for his patent, “Self-powered analog computing architecture with energy monitoring to enable machine-learning vision at the edge.”
Stats
Total Enrollment (AY2025-2026)
External Research Awards (2020-2025)
$46.4M FY25
Total Faculty
92 T/TT, 11 Research, 16 Teaching
Research Centers & Institutes
Co-op Participation
Faculty Highlights
 | Gregory D. Abowd, dean of the College of Engineering and ECE professor, was elected a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the area of Computer Sciences. The Academy honors excellence across disciplines and addresses critical global issues. Abowd also received the Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI) Special Recognition Award “for his extraordinary ability to inspire and mentor individuals from diverse backgrounds and his commitment to fostering collaboration, creativity, and impact.” |
 | ECE Distinguished Professor Nian Sun and William Lincoln Smith Professor Tommaso Melodia were selected as Fellows of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). Election as an Academy Fellow is the highest professional distinction awarded solely to inventors. Sun was also selected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society by the Topical Group on Magnetism and its Applications (GMAG) for his innovations in high magnetization materials, magnetoelastic and magnetoelectric thin film materials, microsystems, and device physics. |
 | ECE/Khoury Professor Yun Raymond Fu was elected a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence for significant contributions to transformative technology innovation in computer vision, augmented human-machine interaction, and leadership in AI technology commercialization. |
 | ECE Professor Hossein Mosallaei was selected as an Optica Fellow (formerly OSA) for outstanding contributions in active and time-modulated optical nanoantennas and metasurfaces. Optica Fellows are chosen based on several factors, including outstanding contributions to research, business, education, engineering, and service to Optica and its community. |
 | Soner Sonmezoglu, ECE assistant professor, was awarded a $13 million grant from the ARPA-H, titled “PAIL: PhotoAcoustic Imaging technology for diagnostic Lung assessment.” The result of the effort will be a radically new optical photoacoustic imaging system with advanced image reconstruction algorithms to assist in diagnosing and treating cancer and other major diseases. |
 | ECE Associate Professor Sarah Ostadabbas received the 2024 Cade Prize for Inventivity in the technology category for AiWover, a groundbreaking spin-off from her lab that uses AI to transform visual monitoring of babies and toddlers and enhances both safety and developmental tracking. |
 | ECE University Distinguished Professor Ali Abur received the 2025 IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) Charles Concordia Power Systems Engineering Award “for contributions to power system state and network model estimation.” |
 | ECE Associate Professor Cristian Cassella (PI), Professor Matteo Rinaldi, Professor David Horsley, and Assistant Professor Benyamin Davaji were awarded a $2 million DARPA grant for “Enabling Higher Scale Factors in Gyroscopes Through soFt and LacAlized interface-States in microelectromecHanical resonators (FLASH).” |
 | ECE Assistant Professor Mahdi Imani was awarded a $1.2 million DARPA grant for “VeriPro: Verified Probabilistic Cognitive Reasoning for Tactical Mixed Reality Systems.” This multidisciplinary effort includes partners from Penn State University (lead), Design Interactive Inc., Kennesaw State University, George Washington University, and the University of Southern California. |
 | ECE Assistant Professor Aravind Nagulu was awarded an NSF CAREER award for “Cryogenic-CMOS and Superconducting Circuits for Scalable Quantum Systems” to address limitations in the hardware infrastructure of quantum computing. |
 | Kristina Johnson, ECE/Bouvé assistant professor, received a NIH Career Development Award for “Using Mobile Technology and Real-World Vocalization Samples To Generate Quantitative Metrics of Vocal Communication for Minimally-Speaking Individuals.” |
 | ECE/Khoury Assistant Professor Weiyan Shi was named as one of MIT’s Tech Review 35 Innovators Under 35 for her work in artificial intelligence and her research in natural language processing and persuasive dialogues. |
 | ECE Assistant Professor Xiaolin Xu was named a recipient of the 2025 IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference (DAC) Under-40 Innovators Award. |
 | ECE Associate Professor Cristian Cassella is the recipient of the European Frequency and Time Forum (EFTF) Young Scientist Award “for his seminal research on metamaterials in RF microacoustics as well as for his pioneering contributions on long-range remote sensors and lower-noise frequency generators through parametric nonlinearities.” |
 | ECE Professor Matteo Rinaldi received the IEEE International Frequency Control Symposium (IFCS) 2025 Walter G. Cady Award for his technical contributions in the area of piezoelectric frequency control devices. |
 | ECE Assistant Professor Francesco Restuccia and ECE Professor & Associate Dean for Research Josep Jornet, in collaboration with Princeton University, Florida International University, and SUNY Polytechnic Institute, were awarded an NSF grant for “DHARMA.AI Digital Hardware + Analog-RF for Multifunctional Apertures with AI.” Restuccia, in collaboration with Saint Louis University, was awarded an NSF grant for “Securing xApps in Open RANs with Reliable and Principled AI Red-Teaming.” Jornet, in collaboration with Princeton University (lead), Florida International University, and New York University, was awarded a $1.2M NSF grant for “Resilient Multi-User Mobile sub-THz Networks using Near-Field Wavefronts.” |
 | ECE Professor Stratis Ioannidis, ECE/Khoury Distinguished Professor Jennifer Dy, and ECE Professor Yanzhi Wang, in collaboration with Kaushik Chowdhury from the University of Texas at Austin, were awarded a $1.1M NSF grant for “Robust Machine Learning at the Edge.” |
 | ECE Associate Professor Pau Closas, in collaboration with Boston University (PI), was awarded a $1.1M NSF grant for “Unveiling Hidden Dynamics of the Auroral Ionosphere Using AI-based Sensor Fusion.” |
 | ECE Associate Professor Cristian Cassella and Professor Marvin Onabajo were awarded an NSF grant for “Low-Power Computing Based on Programmable Multidimensional Circuits.” |
 | ECE Associate Professor Cristian Cassella and Assistant Professor Xufeng Zhang were awarded an NSF grant for “Boosting Radios’ ReSilience to Interference by Harnessing Magnon-Phonon Coupling In the First ElectromechanicaL SpinPhonic Devices (SHIELD).” They are enhancing a wireless transceiver’s resilience against electromagnetic interference in the 5G and 6G realms in order to transmit data at extremely high rates. |
 | ECE Postdoctoral Research Associate Alan Papalia and ECE/COS Assistant Professor David Rosen are recipients of the 2024 IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award for their paper “Certifiably Correct Range-Aided SLAM,” which introduces a fundamental advance in reliable autonomous navigation for robots operating without GPS. |
 | ECE William Lincoln Smith Professor Tommaso Melodia received the Excellence in Research and Creative Activity Award, which is presented to a full-time faculty member to honor outstanding research and creative activity with global impact. |
Student Highlights
 | Bin Luo, PhD’26, electrical engineering, who works in ECE Distinguished Professor Nian Sun’s lab, won the 2024 American Vacuum Society (AVS) National Graduate Research Award, the AVS MEMS/NEMS Group Best Research Work Award, and was a finalist for the Magnetic Interfaces and Nanostructures (MIND) Division Leo Falicov Student Award for Best Presentation of Graduate Research at the AVS 70th Symposium. |
 | Samar Elmaadawy, PhD’25, electrical engineering, advised by ECE Professor & Associate Dean for Research Josep Jornet, received the URSI AP-RASC 2025 Young Scientist Award for her paper on “Cerebral Organoids Respond to Sub-Terahertz and Terahertz Radiation” which she will present at the 2025 URSI Asia-Pacific Radio Science Conference in Sydney, Australia, in August 2025. |
 | Computer engineering student Yicheng Qian, PhD’27, advised by ECE Professor Miriam Leeser, won the 9th Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking (APNet) Best Paper award for their paper on “Miniature: Fast AI Supercomputer Networks Simulation on FPGAs.” |
 | Seyed Hamid Hosseini, PhD’26, electrical engineering, working under the supervision of Assistant Professor Mahdi Imani, received a Best Paper Finalist Award at the 2025 American Control Conference (ACC 2025) for his paper titled “Deep Reinforcement Learning for Intervention of Partially Observable Regulatory Networks.” |
 | Maya De Los Santos, E’25, electrical and computer engineering, was nominated for the Churchill Scholarship, which provides funding to American students for a year of master’s study at Churchill College, which is part of the University of Cambridge. |
 | A Northeastern University student team was placed third in the University Rover Challenge of The Mars Society. They competed in Utah with 39 teams from around the world against schools like the University of Michigan, Cornell, as well as teams from Japan, Bangladesh, Turkey, and more. |
 | The London Northeastern Robotics Club secured first place in the 2025 National Unibots Competition held at the University of Cambridge, besting 10 other teams with its robot that incorporated a vacuum motor, which gave it an edge against its competitors. |
 | Northeastern’s SEDS club developed a mixed reality system for controlling lunar rovers as part of NASA’s SUITS competition. Collaborating with a University of Michigan team, they created VR interfaces that could enable efficient remote operation of robots for future moon settlements. |
 | RoboTwin, technology that could enable human workers to seamlessly collaborate in real time with robotic systems from anywhere in the world over non-specialized networks, earned the Best Demo Award at HotMobile 2025. |
 | Ruyi Ding, PhD’25, computer engineering, is the recipient of an Outstanding PhD Student Award in Research, which recognizes those who have shown an exceptional ability to conduct high-level research and make contributions to the scholarly literature in their fields. |
 | Vaibhav Kejriwal, MS’25, electrical and computer engineering, received the 2025 Outstanding Master’s Student Award in Teaching from Northeastern for his dedication to academic excellence and mentorship, impactful contributions to research and innovation, and commitment to fostering a collaborative learning environment. |
 | Muhammad Elarbi, MS’26, electrical and computer engineering, received a Northeastern University Outstanding Master’s Student Award in Community Impact for his dedication to STEM education outreach and expanding access to technical knowledge for underrepresented students. |
PhD Spotlights
Duschia Bodet, PhD’25, Electrical Engineering
Duschia Bodet, PhD’25, electrical engineering, conducts research at the forefront of wireless communications with a focus on modulation techniques and beam control for sub-terahertz, multiple antenna systems. In addition to being published, she won Best Paper Award at GLOBECOM and received the Paul Baran Young Scholar Award from the Marconi Society.
Aria Masoomi, PhD’24, Computer Engineering, and Mathematics
Aria Masoomi, PhD’24, computer engineering, and PhD’24, mathematics, focused his dissertation research for computer engineering on “Making Deep Neural Networks Transparent.” His mathematics thesis was “Poisson Geometry of Flag Varieties and Representation Theory of Their Quantum Deformation.”
