I spoke to yet another beneficiary of the provost’s tier 1 interdisciplinary research seed grant program yesterday. Elizabeth Dillon’s work is a bit different from most of the people I talk to these days — she’s an English professor. But she’s doing incredible things combining the humanities and computation, mining historical texts for the prevalence ...
Salem Zahmi grew up under a very hot sun. So it’s no wonder that this graduate student from the United Arab Emirates is studying solar energy. He hopes to contribute to a growing research campaign in the UAE that is looking to take advantage of the country’s renewable resources as it recognizes the unsustainable nature ...
As a Freshman, Monyrath Chan became the first Torch Scholar to pursue research at Northeastern. Torch is a scholarship program dedicated to closing the achievement gap for first-generation, low-income students from diverse backgrounds. Torch students receive comprehensive support that improves their college retention rate, leadership opportunities, social capital and academic achievement. Chan used that support ...
Today I met a pretty awesome person (who looks uncannily like my uncle). Professor of pharmaceutical sciences Ban-An Khaw is an immunology guy, or at least that’s how he classified himself when I asked for his background story. And what an interesting story it is! A few decades ago, Khaw figured out a way to ...
Targeted drug delivery is a hot topic these days. Chemotherapy, for example, blindly kills anything in its path — these drugs don’t distinguish between healthy cells and cancerous cells; they just kill cells. Period. Professor Vladimir Torchilin and his buddies at the Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence are developing nanoscale drug delivery technologies, which I ...
Nanotechnology is a huge field. When I worked at a nanomaterials start-up my dad would often ask me about developments in nanomedicine and I had no clue what to say. Nanotechnology enables new applications in medicine, electronics, materials — pretty much anything you can imagine. But, fundamentally, it’s pretty simple: It’s about making things so ...
Before joining Northeastern’s fabulous (if I do say so myself) news team about a month ago, I worked at a start-up chemical company in Westwood, MA where I was surrounded by Erlenemeyer flasks and flat-bottomed evaporation vessels containing a slew of organic nano-materials dissolved in toluene, xylene or, my personal favorite, decahydronaphthalene. These solutions, which ...