Northeastern is planning the largest academic initiative in its 105-year history, which includes hiring a hundred new professors at a cost of $75 million. The move is aimed at vaulting the university toward its goal of becoming one of the top one-hundred national universities according to the U.S. News & World Report rankings.

The plan will raise the number of tenured and tenure-track faculty from 580 to 680. The first high-profile hire is Michail Sitkovsky, a longtime National Institutes of Health researcher, who will lead a new biotechnology center studying diseases that involve inflammation.

And it will create or strengthen other nationally significant research centers at Northeastern. As part of this effort, two new interdisciplinary research centers have been announced: one on urban environmental studies, and another on security and public policy. A third center, now in the planning stages, will study novel drugs for fighting cancer and infectious disease.

Research in nanomanufacturing and sensing and imaging will also be emphasized. President Freeland, who unveiled the plan at a faculty senate meeting last month, said Northeastern must “add scholarly strength in carefully targeted areas of research.”

The plan calls for top faculty hires in such rapid-growth areas as communications, architecture, international business, pharmacy practice, and multimedia studies, and the enhancement of graduate programs in business, engineering, computer science, pharmacy, and counseling psychology.

It also calls for boosting library resources, improving and expanding honors programs, and increasing the number of advisers and research support staff.

Funding is expected to come from revenues from improved undergraduate retention, increased graduate enrollments and funded research, and the university’s current $200 million fundraising campaign.

The plan aims to build on Northeastern’s recent success in improving the campus and attracting top students and faculty.

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