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
New Project Combines Biology, Music, and Math to Display Limb Regeneration
A project named “Morphogenesis,” led by Garret Compston and MIE/BioE Professor Sandra Shefelbine, uses Alan Turing’s pattern with musical representation to portray the biological process behind how individual cells, tissues and organs develop their specific shapes and structures when the embryo is still developing.
New Guidelines Aim to Make Technology Research More Accessible and Easier to Verify
ECE Professor Miriam Leeser and her co-authors examine the evolution of research transparency in their editorial, “Artifact Evaluation in the FPGA Community and in ACM TRETS,” published in ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems.
Groundbreaking Research on MIMO Wireless Networks
ECE Assistant Professor Francesco Restuccia received the 2026 IEEE INFOCOM Best Paper Award for his research on “BANDWEAVE: Enhanced Channel Estimation in MIMO Networks with Multi-Band Fusion,” which highlights his groundbreaking research on MIMO wireless networks.
New Research Recognized Among Top 24 Global Breakthroughs at OFC Conference
ECE Assistant Professor Yuan Yuan and his research team achieved a global distinction at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) 2026 for their paper, “Fully Integrated 1064 nm Transmitters With Widely Tunable GaAs Lasers and > 100-GHz Thin-Film LiNbO3 Modulators.”