Research
Boldly innovating to impact society and transform the world.
Northeastern University has achieved the prestigious recognition as a top-tier R1 institution for research activity among U.S. colleges and universities by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. Our tradition of partnership and engagement guides a use-inspired and interdisciplinary research enterprise that is strategically aligned with three global imperatives: health, security, and sustainability. Our annual Annual Report highlights pioneering research and achievements over the past year.
The College of Engineering has over 240 tenured/tenure-track faculty, each bringing complementary areas of research expertise to address pressing global challenges. Their state-of-art-research looks at critical issues in materials, processes, systems, infrastructure, hardware and software at every scale—nano to macro to global—grounded in a translational approach that integrates the values of fundamental and applied research.
Our faculty boldly innovate by collaborating across engineering disciplines and the university, as well as with government, academia, and industry. The College of Engineering has more than 20 multidisciplinary research centers and institutes with funding from eight federal agencies. Our commitment to conducting transformative research to better the world can be seen by our growth in external research funding, which exceeds $100 million annually, and by an investment in research facilities such as our 223,000 square foot, six-story Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex and 367,000 square foot, eight-story EXP facility for teaching and research.
Research At-A-Glance
External Research Funding (FY2024)
Research Centers and Institutes
Young Investigator Awards (as of Aug. 2024)
Patents 2018-Aug. 2024
Related Resources
Understand how Northeastern partners with industry for research and workforce development
View the faculty directory for more information on individual researchers.
Recent News
Addressing Backdoor Attacks on Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN)
Research developed by the Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things on “How to Poison an xApp: Dissecting Backdoor Attacks to Deep Reinforcement Learning in Open Radio Access Networks” was published in Computer Networks.
New Analog Chip Design Improves Performance for Modern Radar Systems
Electrical engineering graduate student Aswin Undavalli, PhD’29, and ECE Assistant Professor Aravind Nagulu published their research on “Fully Analog, Multi-Lag, RF Correlators for Code-Domain Radars Using Margin Propagation” in the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.
PNAS Perspective Defines Mechanomedicine as Target for Disease Treatment
Ning Wang, bioengineering professor and director of the Institute for Mechanobiology, co-authored a perspective article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on “Mechanomedicine: Present state and future promise,” in which they define and map out the future of this critical emerging field.
ECE Research on Energy-Efficient Serverless Computing Recognized at SC25
ECE Associate Professor Devesh Tiwari’s research group received the Best Paper Finalist honor at The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC25), the premier international conference for High Performance Computing (HPC). The paper, “GreenMix: Energy-Efficient Serverless Computing via Randomized Sketching on Asymmetric Multi-Cores,” presents a novel technique to significantly improve energy efficiency in modern serverless computing systems.