NU receives $20 million donation for CenSSIS.

Northeastern has received a $20 million donation aimed at keeping U.S. engineers at the forefront of new discoveries and technology.

The gift, from a foundation created by Bernard M. Gordon, founder of high-tech firms Analogic and NeuroLogica, and his wife, Sophia, will support Northeasternís trailblazing work in subsurface sensing and imaging.

"This is a transformational gift," says Michael Silevitch, director of the universityís Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems (CenSSIS) and Robert Black Professor of

Engineering. "Bernard Gordon thinks we are the right place to attack the problem of Americaís maintaining its technological leadership in the world in the next fifty to a hundred years. Weíve been given $20 million to address this challenge of national import."

For the past six years, CenSSIS, under a multimillion-dollar National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, has brought together university, government, and industry partners to find new ways to "see" hidden objects—everything from tumors, to buried land mines, to roaming schools of fish. One of these partners has been Analogic, a medical- and security-imaging company.

Gordon, an MIT graduate and 1986 National Medal of Technology recipient, who has been concerned about a decline in the quantity and the quality of American engineers, decided that Northeastern is "the right place to really attack this problem," says Silevitch. "The import of this significant gift is that Northeastern is now in the big leagues of universities."

The donation from the seventy-nine-year-old Gordon will help CenSSIS evolve from an academic research center into a research and development center. It will be renamed the Gordon Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems. The gift will also establish a one-year graduate program, called the Gordon Engineering Leadership Program, aimed at building an elite corps of engineering professionals.

Lynn Preston, director of the NSFís Engineering Research Center program, says the Gordon gift will lead to "more innovative and creative" engineers. "This masterís program will give them a chance to make a product and make sure it works," she says.

Since the late 1980s, the Gordon Foundation has donated more than $100 million, much of it to train engineers and scientists and support medical and educational initiatives.

See the next issue of the magazine for much more information about the Gordon gift and its impact.

• E Line Story Index