Title
Topic
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National Academy of Inventors honors Northeastern innovators
“Northeastern’s National Academy of Inventors chapter honored electrical and computer engineering University Distinguished and William Lincoln Smith Professor Vincent Harris with the Innovation Impact Award; Justin Hayes, PhD’25, chemical engineering, with the Student Innovation Impact Award; and bioengineering assistant research professor Saeed Amal with the Emerging Visionary Award, for their significant contributions to innovation, particularly in AI-driven healthcare.”
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DARPA Award to revolutionize navigation systems
“Electrical and computer engineering 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).’ This project aims to develop a new microelectromechanical (MEMS) inertial sensor surpassing the material-limited performance of the existing counterparts by exploiting topological properties in thin-film piezoelectric metamaterials.”
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Restuccia and Jornet receive NSF grant for AI-incorporated hardware
“Electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Francesco Restuccia and electrical and computer engineering professor and associate Dean for Research Josep Jornet, in collaboration with Princeton University, Florida International University, and SUNY Polytechnic Institute, were awarded a $200,000 NSF grant for ‘DHARMA.AI Digital Hardware + Analog-RF for Multifunctional Apertures with AI.'”
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Patent for automated of drone swarm networks
“Electrical and computer engineering William Lincoln Smith Professor Tommaso Melodia and associate research professor Salvatore D’Oro were awarded a patent for ‘Software Defined Drone Network Control System.'”
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AI-powered drone networks
“Electrical and computer engineering William Lincoln Smith Professor Tommaso Melodia and associate research professor Salvatore D’Oro were awarded a patent for ‘Distributed Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Software-Defined Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Network Control.'”
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‘Lysine vitcylation is a vitamin C-derived protein modification that enhances STAT1-mediated immune response’
“Vitamin C (vitC) is essential for health and shows promise in treating diseases like cancer, yet its mechanisms remain elusive. Here, we report that vitC directly modifies lysine residues to form “vitcyl-lysine”-a process termed vitcylation. Vitcylation occurs in a dose-, pH-, and sequence-dependent manner in both cell-free systems and living cells. … The discovery of vitcylation as a distinctive post-translational modification provides significant insights into vitC’s cellular function and therapeutic potential, opening avenues for understanding its biological effects and applications in disease treatment.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Cell.
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‘Tunable Superconductivity Coexisting With the Anomalous Hall Effect in a Transition Metal Dichalcogenide’
“Antibiotic resistance poses a significant threat to human health, and wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are important reservoirs of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs). Here, we analyze the antibiotic resistomes of 226 activated sludge samples from 142 WWTPs across six continents, using a consistent pipeline for sample collection, DNA sequencing and analysis. We find that ARGs are diverse and similarly abundant, with a core set of 20 ARGs present in all WWTPs.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nature Communications.
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‘A Phosphorylation Signal Activates Genome-Wide Transcriptional Control by BfmR’
“The nosocomial pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii is a major threat to human health. The sensor kinase-response regulator system, BfmS-BfmR, is essential to multidrug resistance and virulence in the bacterium and represents a potential antimicrobial target. Important questions remain about how the system controls resistance and pathogenesis. Although BfmR knockout alters expression of >1000 genes, its direct regulon is undefined. Moreover, how phosphorylation controls the regulator is unclear. Here, we address these problems by combining mutagenesis, ChIP-seq, and in vitro phosphorylation to study the functions of phospho-BfmR.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nucleic Acids Research.
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‘Synergistic Signatures of Group Mechanisms in Higher-Order Systems’
“The interplay between causal mechanisms and emerging collective behaviors is a central aspect of understanding, controlling, and predicting complex networked systems. In our work, we investigate the relationship between higher-order mechanisms and higher-order behavioral observables in two representative models with group interactions: a simplicial Ising model and a social contagion model. In both systems, we find that group (higher-order) interactions show emergent synergistic (higher-order) behavior.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Physical Review Letters.
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‘Supercooled Phase Transitions: Why Thermal History of Hidden Sector Matters in Analysis of Pulsar Timing Array Signals’
“The detection of a gravitational wave background in the nanohertz frequency range from pulsar timing array (PTA) observations offers new insights into evolution of the early Universe. In this work we analyze gravitational wave data from PPTA, EPTA, and NANOGrav, as arising from a supercooled first-order phase transition within a hidden sector, characterized by a broken 𝑈(1)𝑋 gauge symmetry. Several previous works have discussed challenges in producing observable PTA signal from supercooled phases transitions. We discuss these challenges and show how they are overcome.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Physical Review D.
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‘Symmetric Circle Configurations From Regular Skeletal Polyhedra’
“The paper studies finite and infinite periodic point-circle configurations in ordinary Euclidean 3-space associated with regular skeletal polyhedra or related structures. The configurations preserve all the symmetries of the underlying polyhedron and, in most cases, are point-circle transitive.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Symmetry.
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Patents for experimental virtual reality methods
“Electrical and computer engineering affiliated faculty Eugene Tunik and Bouvé/electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Mathew Yarossi were awarded a patent for ‘Computer-Implemented Methods and Systems for Designing and Conducting Virtual Reality Experiments.'”
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‘Functional Diversification of Dietary Plant Small Molecules by the Gut Microbiome’
“Plants are composed of diverse secondary metabolites (PSMs), which are widely associated with human health. Whether and how the gut microbiome mediates such impacts of PSMs is poorly understood. Here, we show that discrete dietary and medicinal phenolic glycosides, abundant health-associated PSMs, are utilized by distinct members of the human gut microbiome.” Find the paper and full list of authors in CellPress.
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‘Limiting the Impact of Protein Leakage in Single-Cell Proteomics’
“Limiting artifacts during sample preparation can significantly increase data quality in single-cell proteomics experiments. Towards this goal, we characterize the impact of protein leakage by analyzing thousands of primary single cells from mouse trachea. The cells were prepared either fresh immediately after dissociation or first cryopreserved and prepared at a later date. We directly identify permeabilized cells by imaging a cell permeable dye and use the data to define a signature for protein leakage.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nature Communications.
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‘A Universal Language for Finding Mass Spectrometry Data Patterns’
“Despite being information rich, the vast majority of untargeted mass spectrometry data are underutilized; most analytes are not used for downstream interpretation or reanalysis after publication. The inability to dive into these rich raw mass spectrometry datasets is due to the limited flexibility and scalability of existing software tools. Here we introduce a new language, the Mass Spectrometry Query Language (MassQL), and an accompanying software ecosystem that addresses these issues by enabling the community to directly query mass spectrometry data with an expressive set of user-defined mass spectrometry patterns.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nature Methods.
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NSF award to model crystal growth
“Chemical engineering associate professor Francisco Hung, in collaboration with Erik Santiso from North Carolina State University, was awarded a $590,666 NSF grant for ‘Molecular Modeling of Solute Precipitate Nucleation in Confinement.'”
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‘Spectrally Sharp Magnetic Excitations Above the Critical Temperature in a Frustrated Weyl Semimetal’
“The rare-earth α-pyrochlore iridates are a prospective class of conducting frustrated magnets where electronic correlations, large spin-orbit coupling, and geometrical frustration interplay, leading to a rich set of magnetic and electronic phases. Despite their intriguing properties, the magnetic order and excitations in this fundamental class of topological quantum materials remain poorly understood. … We unequivocally reveal the presence of spectrally sharp, gapped magnetic excitations in Y2Ir2O7 that surprisingly persist well above the Néel transition temperature, signaling the presence of a quasi-universal regime connected to fluctuations on frustrated lattices.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nature Commmunications.
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‘Machine Learning Photodynamics Decode Multiple Singlet Fission Channels in Pentacene Crystal’
“Crystalline pentacene is a model solid-state light-harvesting material because its quantum efficiencies exceed 100% via ultrafast singlet fission. The singlet fission mechanism in pentacene crystals is disputed due to insufficient electronic information in time-resolved experiments and intractable quantum mechanical calculations for simulating realistic crystal dynamics. Here we combine a multiscale multiconfigurational approach and machine learning photodynamics to understand competing singlet fission mechanisms in crystalline pentacene.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nature Communications.
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‘Genetically Encoded Fluorescent Reporter for Polyamines’
“Polyamines are abundant and evolutionarily conserved metabolites that are essential for life. Dietary polyamine supplementation extends life-span and health-span. Dysregulation of polyamine homeostasis is linked to Parkinson’s disease and cancer, driving interest in therapeutically targeting this pathway. However, measuring cellular polyamine levels, which vary across cell types and states, remains challenging. We introduce a genetically encoded polyamine reporter for real-time measurement of polyamine concentrations in single living cells.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nature Communications.
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‘Leading AI Adoption in Organizations: Introducing a Behavioral Human-Centered Approach’
“Initiatives to implement AI technologies in organizations fail at an alarming rate. We argue that leading the adoption of AI is not a simple engineering exercise but rather represents a behavioral exercise where change management principles—the process by which organizations plan, implement, and embed changes in practices—are employed. … We integrate ideas from change management with scholarship on human-centered artificial intelligence to offer a behavioral approach that accounts for the impact of AI adoption on humans at all stages of implementation and change management.” Find the paper and authors list in International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction.
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‘Atomistic Characterization of Hydration-Dependent Fuel Cell Ionomer Nanostructure: Validation by Vibrational Spectroscopy’
“The development of Nafion alternatives for fuel cells and electrolyzers requires a fundamental understanding of hydration-dependent ion-exchange site acid/base chemistry. We present here reactive force field (ReaxFF) molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of Nafion at varying molar water/ion-exchange-site ratios (λ), which we correlate to our experimental and density functional theory-based vibrational spectra. … We expect that these nanostructural characterizations of Nafion exchange sites will contribute to the development of new ionomers.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Journal of Materials Chemistry A.
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‘Bridging Deep Learning Force Fields and Electronic Structures With a Physics-Informed Approach’
“This work presents a physics-informed neural network approach bridging deep-learning force field and electronic structure simulations, illustrated through twisted two-dimensional large-scale material systems. The deep potential molecular dynamics model is adopted as the backbone, and the electronic structure simulation is integrated. Using Wannier functions as the basis, we categorize Wannier Hamiltonian elements based on physical principles to incorporate diverse information from a deep-learning force field model.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Computational Materials.
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‘Photolytic Activation of Ni(II)X2L Explains How Ni-Mediated Cross Coupling Begins’
“Nickel photocatalysis has recently become vital to organic synthesis, but how the Ni(II)X2L pre-catalyst (X = Cl, Br; L = bidentate ligand) becomes activated to Ni(I)XL has remained puzzling and is typically addressed on a case-by-case basis. Here, we reveal a general mechanism where light induces photolysis of the Ni(II)-X bond, either via direct excitation or triplet energy transfer.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nature Communications.
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‘Long-Lived Zone-Boundary Magnons in an Antiferromagnet’
“Antiferromagnetic (AFM) insulators exhibit many desirable features for spintronic applications such as fast dynamics in the THz range and robustness to fluctuating external fields. However, large damping typically associated with THz magnons presents a serious challenge for THz magnonic applications. Here, we report long-lived short-wavelength zone boundary magnons in the honeycomb AFM insulator CoTiO3, recently found to host topological magnons. We find that its zone-boundary THz magnons exhibit longer lifetimes than its zone-center magnons.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nature Communications.
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‘Why the Ethical Use of AI Matters for Your Career’
“In the contemporary digital era, innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI) are profoundly transforming the business landscape. … Yet, amidst these advantages lies an ethical conundrum. Customers cherish genuine human interaction and can become quickly disillusioned when they realise they’re communicating with a bot, not a person (Ciechanowski, Przegalinska, Magnuski & Gloor, 2019). Balancing this desire for authenticity with the allure of operational efficiency poses a challenge, making it tempting for businesses to deceive customers by blurring the lines between human and machine.” Find the paper and full list of authors in European Business Review.
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Furth wins Exceptional Paper Award
“Civil and environmental engineering professor Peter Furth and his former student Milad Tahmasebi, PhD’24, civil engineering, won the Exceptional Paper Award at the 104th Annual Transportation Research Board Meeting for ‘Reducing Speeding by Removing Speeding Opportunities: Field Test of Safe Waves Traffic Signal Timing.'”
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‘A Twist on Heterotic Little String Duality’
“In this work, we significantly expand the web of T-dualities among heterotic NS5-brane theories with eight supercharges. This is achieved by introducing twists involving outer automorphisms of discrete gauge/flavor factors and tensor multiplet permutations along the compactification circle. We assemble field theory data that we propose as invariants across T-dual theories, comprised of twisted Coulomb branch dimensions, higher group structures and flavor symmetry ranks.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Journal of High Energy Physics.
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‘Pseudouridine Reprogramming in the Human T Cell Epitranscriptome: From Primary to Immortalized States’
“Immortalized cell lines are commonly used as proxies for primary cells in human biology research. … The analysis of the 13% of sites unique to each cell type reveals that Jurkat cells contained transcripts linked to immune activation and oncogenesis, while primary T cells contained transcripts associated with calcium signaling and intracellular trafficking. We provide a list of these genes, which should be considered when using immortalized cells to study RNA modifications in immunology contexts.” Find the paper and full list of authors in RNA.
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‘Galvanotactic Directionality of Cell Groups Depends on Group Size’
“Motile cells migrate directionally in electric fields. This behavior—galvanotaxis—is important in many physiological phenomena. Individual fish keratocytes migrate to the cathode, while inhibition of PI3-Kinase (PI3K) reverses single cells to the anode. Uninhibited cell groups move to the cathode. Surprisingly, groups of PI3K-inhibited cells exhibit bidirectional behavior: Large groups move to the cathode, while small groups move to the anode. A mechanical model suggests that a tug-of-war between the outer and inner cells directs the cell groups.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Cell Biology.