SENTRY Spotlight: Mahshid Asri
Mahshid Asri, PhD’24, electrical engineering, who as a student was a researcher at SENTRY and ALERT research centers, is a new postdoctoral research associate in SENTRY’s Advanced Sensing Technologies research area, working on the Stationary and Aerial Based Radio Frequency/Radar Detection of Drones and Concealed Threats project.
Mahshid Asri, PhD’24, electrical engineering, is a new postdoctoral research associate at SENTRY’s Advanced Sensing Technologies research area, and will contribute to the Stationary and Aerial Based Radio Frequency/Radar Detection of Drones and Concealed Threats project.
An international student from Iran, Asri was a student researcher at SENTRY and ALERT, both U.S. Department of Homeland Security Centers of Excellence, where she focused on radar imaging and anomaly detection of airport passengers and contributed to the development of a whole-body scanner prototype.
Asri began her academic journey at Iran University of Science and Technology, where she earned a BS in electrical engineering. Her undergraduate thesis focused on developing orthogonal frequency division multiple access techniques on a digital signal processing board. She continued her education at Northeastern, enrolling in a master’s program before transitioning to a PhD program in electrical engineering. She completed her PhD in April 2024 with her dissertation, “Development of Anomaly Detection and Characterization Algorithms Using Wideband Radar Image Processing for Security Applications.”
Asri began working at ALERT in 2018 as a research assistant for the center’s current director, Carey Rappaport. She contributed to ALERT’s Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) directed research by developing an automatic algorithm to detect anomalies of airport passengers using mm-wave radar images, a task that formed a significant part of her MS and PhD research. She was responsible for writing physics-based code and testing algorithm performance, particularly focused on identifying the dielectric constant of non-metallic anomalies.
In addition, Asri contributed to developing a whole-body scanner prototype for the Computational Models and Algorithms for Millimeter-Wave Whole Body Scanning for Advanced Imaging Technology project. She helped calibrate radar systems, wrote algorithms to remove image clutter, and tested these algorithms using radar images of a manikin. Her contributions were instrumental in advancing the development of this radar prototype.
In her current postdoctoral research associate role, she is contributing to SENTRY’s Stationary and Aerial Based Radio Frequency/Radar Detection of Drones and Concealed Threats project, which is focused on developing methods to monitor pedestrians for large metallic guns and knives. She has collected extensive data using computational electromagnetic simulations and applied deep learning models for image segmentation, detection, and localization of anomalies on radar images.
Looking ahead, she intends to build on her experience with SENTRY and ALERT, seeking industry positions that align with her skills and passion for meaningful engineering work.
She enjoys nurturing her collection of plants, hiking, and participating in a non-fiction book club. She is also a talented musician who plays the playing the santoor, a classical Iranian instrument.
Source: SENTRY