Cyber-Physics Sensors for Affective Science Research
Srinivas Sridhar (Physics), Lisa Barrett (Psychology)

Exploring the Link between Bacterial DNA Damage Response and Biofilm Disassembly
Yunrong Chai (Biology), Veronica Godoy-Carter (Biology), Edgar Goluch (Chemical Engineering)

Investigating Trust and Nonverbal Behavior through Virtual Worlds
Magy Seif El-Nasr (Game Design/Computer and Information Science), Derek Isaacowitz (Psychology), David DeSteno (Psychology), Matthew Gray (Theater)

The phonological grammar in dyslexia: functional and neural evaluation
Iris Berent (Psychology), Chieh Li (Counseling and Applied Educational Psychology)

An insect model for understanding the genetic basis of transgenerational immunity
Wendy Smith (Biology), Rebeca Rosengaus (Marine and Environmental Science), Steve Vollmer (Marine and Environmental Science), Michail Sitkovsky (Pharmaceutical Sciences/Biology)

Mining Academic Databases for the Study of Faculty International Networks
Kathrin Zippel (Sociology/Anthropology), Rich DeJordy (Management and Organizational Development)

Using MALDI mass spectrometry imaging to map spinal cord regeneration in a regeneration-competent vertebrate model system
Gunter Zupanc (Biology), Jeffrey Agar (Chemistry and Chemical Biology/Pharmaceutical Sciences)

Plasmonic  Metamaterials: A Sustainable, Bottom-up Approach
Ke Zhang (Chemistry and Chemical Biology), Yongmin Liu (Mechanical and Industrial Engineering/Electrical and Computer Engineering)

Nanotechnology for the nervous system: Developing injectable materials for nervous system tissue engineering applications
Thomas Webster (Chemical Engineering), Jeffrey Agar (Chemistry and Chemical Biology/Pharmaceutical Sciences)

Mapping Opportunities for Coastal Urban Production of Food and Fuel: What Do We Know and Where Can We Grow?
Matthew Eckelman (Civil and Environmental Engineering), Matthias Ruth (Public Policy/Civil and Environmental Engineering), Jane Amidon (Architecture)

Nanosensors for monitoring biophysical signaling during tissue regeneration
James Monaghan (Biology), Heather Clark (Pharmaceutical Sciences)

Finding Underlying Manifolds of Large-Scale Complex Biosignal Dynamics
Raymond Fu (Electrical and Computer Engineering), Karen Quigley (Psychology), Yizhou Sun (Computer and Information Science), Deniz Erdogmus (Electrical and Computer Engineering), Dana Brooks (Electrical and Computer Engineering)

Graphene Photonics for Terahertz Radiation
Yongmin Liu (Mechanical and Industrial Engineering/Electrical and Computer Engineering), Swastik Kar (Physics)

Educational Analytics: Maximizing the Value of Data-Driven Insights from Students’ Performance and Activity in Online Classes
Alessandro Canossa (Game Design), Anders Drachen (Game Design), Magy Seif El-Nasr (Game Design/Computer and Information Science)

Development of an Adaptive Clinician-Friendly Virtual Rehabilitation System and its Evaluation in Post-Operative Shoulder Therapy
Dagmar Sternad (Biology/Electrical and Computer Engineering), Miriam Leeser (Electrical and Computer Engineering), Amee L. Seitz (Physical Therapy)

Brain-Computer Interface for Signaling Changes in Psychological States
Lisa Barrett (Psychology), Karen Quigley (Psychology), Deniz Erdogmus (Electrical and Computer Engineering), Dana Brooks (Electrical and Computer Engineering), Jennifer Dy (Electrical and Computer Engineering), Stephen Intille (Computer and Information Science/Health Sciences)

Towards a Development of a Protocol for Communication Planning
Alan Zaremba (Communication Studies), Fred Wiseman (Supply Chain Information Management Group)

Infectious Texts: Uncovering Reprinting Networks in 19th Century Newspapers
Ryan Cordell (English), David Smith (Computer and Information Science), Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (English)

Designing Community-Driven Technologies for Physical Activity Promotion in Families
Andrea Parker (Computer and Information Science/Health Sciences), Carmen Sceppa (Health Sciences), Jessica Hoffman (Counseling and Applied Educational Psychology)

Imaging the Dynamic Behavior of Lung
Andrew Gouldstone (Mechanical and Industrial Engineering), Charles DiMarzio (Electrical and Computer Engineering)

“Full of strange ideas: Beppo Grillo in Bologna.” Photo by antonella.beccaria via Flickr.

In late February, something happened to the Italian government that had never happened before: a hung parliament. After 75 percent of the population turned out to vote, it took two days to tally the results. Now, almost three weeks later, the center right and center left parties remain in a steadfast gridlock. A third party–the so-called 5 Star Movement–received only marginally fewer votes. Which wouldn’t be all that exciting, except that the 5 Star Movement is just a single guy, and that guy is a comedian–Beppe Grillo–who refuses to speak on television or radio, lest his message be skewed. Instead, he blogs and he speaks in the piazzas around Italy.

The hung parliament and the comedian contender mark an odd time for Italy, which will have it’s next election in less than a year, according to people who know about Italian politics (of which I’m not one). Things are changing online and off, and the old ways of doing things are clearly not holding up. That’s even true of the polling methods that were used to predict the outcome of the election in the weeks leading up to it.

In a great article on the Daily Beast, which gives an awesomely readable and accessible account of the ever-so-complicated Italian political climate, Tim Parks recaps the final counts for the four main candidates, Luigi Bersani, Mario Monti, Silvio Berlusconi, and Grillo, respectively:

So 30 percent to grim support of the old workplace; 10 percent to the gentleman upholding the international monetary system; 30 percent to the rich, old guy inviting us all to have a good time; and 25 percent to the wild man who wants to kick ass.

How did the pollsters fair? Not great. They gave 40 percent to Bersani (the old workplace), 20 percent to Monti (the gentleman), less than 20 percent to Berlusconi (the old rich guy), and 15 percent to comedian Beppe.

Northeastern professor Alessandro Vespignani was also watching the election closely, and he and his team at the Laboratory for Modeling Biological and Socio-technical Systems made a few predictions of their own. They got all of them right except for one: Berlusconi.

How did they do it? And why were they off for the old rich guy? Well, it all goes back to that old ways thing I said earlier. Calling people on the phone seems to no longer be the easiest or most efficient way to probe society’s sentiments. In collaboration with researchers at the Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation in Italy, Vespignani’s team tracked voter’s intentions by what they said on Twitter, instead. And actually, according to one of the project coordinators, Northeastern researcher Nicola Perra, “We did not make predictions. We just studied the raw signal, and there are biases, in geography, age, et cetera.”

On their website, TweetPolitik (it’s all in Italian), the team demonstrates results from three different types of analyses, which they performed in the weeks leading up to the election.

First, they made activity maps using geo-localization data. These show where in the country people tweeting about each of the candidates reside. “Each dot in the maps is a tweet. The transparent circles represent how intense the signal was in each census area,” said Perra. So, the map of Twitter activity about Beppe Grillo looks like this:

Activity map displaying tweets mentioning 5 Start Movement candidate, Beppe Grillo. 53% of the tweets came from the northern region of the country. Image via TweetPolitik.

While the one for Berlusconi looks like this:

Activity map showing tweets for Berlusconi. Nearly 50% of these tweets came from the North. Image via TweetPolitik.

Conversation maps show the highways of conversation on Twitter for each party. These data came from hashtags associated with the various parties and represent people in different areas tweeting about the same thing:

Conversation map showing Twitter discussions using hashtags associated with Bersani’s party, the center left. Most conversations took place between residents of large metropolitan areas, usually in the North or South of the country. Image via TweetPolitik.

Finally, (and this one is my favorite), the monitoring stream graphic shows how various discussion topics evolved over time in a ten day period surrounding the election.  On February 19th around 7 o’clock, Beppe was a popular subject:

A snapshot of twitter activity by Italian voters in the days leading up to the election on February 24. Image via TweetPolitik.

All of this is just reporting the signal that they saw in the data. The “predictions” (which weren’t really predictions, but just signals) came from the global share of activity seen for each party. This stuff isn’t presented on the site.

“In summa, some numbers were really close to the final outcome, others were not,” said Perra. “The reasons of the discrepancies are biases. We could have corrected the signals considering age distribution, Twitter penetration in different areas, but we decided not to make it about prediction, at this round.”

But this still leaves the question of why Berlusconi evaded their glance, even if it wasn’t a prediction. That has to do with social phenomena, said Vespignani. Berlusconi promised to repeal an important but hefty tax put in place by the last president, Monti (who actually took over for Berlusconi when he was obviously flailing during the height of the economic crisis). Everyone knew this was a bad idea for the country, but it was also incredibly tantalizing for each individual taxpayer. So, no one in their right mind would claim to support Berlusconi, in person or on Twitter. But behind the safe shield of a voting booth? That’s another story.

These new platforms were just starting to emerge when professor Andrea Parker began her career as computer programmer who happened to be interested in social activism. “It was very exciting, but I noticed that it sort of was being done with this implicit assumption that the opportunity to achieve a healthy lifestyle was equal for everyone,” she said.

Researchers were taking the “if we build it, they will come” approach without accounting for barriers that might be getting in the way for some underserved populations.

For instance, it’s not always just the lack of an app that prevents people from living healthfully. “In some neighborhoods parents don’t want their kids to go play outside because it’s not safe,” said Parker. “In some neighborhoods they’re not eating a balanced diet because the access to healthy foods is lower.”

As she began carving out her niche in the field, Parker realized she could use her skills to design programs that put not only the power of health in peoples’ hands, but also the power for change.

Photo by Brooks Canaday.

As a post-doctoral researcher at Georgia Tech, Parker developed tools for children to critically engage with advertising or for community members to inspire each other to eat more healthfully. Having joined the faculty at Northeastern’s College of Computer and Information Sciences this winter, Parker is reeling with ideas on how to apply the things she’s learned in new and bigger ways.

She has already begun to collaborate with Carmen Sceppa and Jessica Hoffman, both professors in the Bouvé College of Health Sciences. Sceppa and Hoffman are co-investigators on Healthy Kids, Healthy Futures (HKHF), a program aimed at preventing childhood obesity by supporting health promoting environments in the home, school, and community .

One component of HKHF is called Open Gym, and it provides a safe place for kids and their parents to engage in physical activity once a week. The idea is to encourage children to be active, but also for parents to model healthy behaviors. “But how do we encourage physical activity in that whole week in between when they come to Open Gym?” Parker asked.  As you might imagine, she thinks a solution lies in interactive technologies.

One idea she has is to give kids activity monitors to wear throughout the week which will wirelessly transmit data on how active they’ve been. The more active they’ve been, the more points they get toward unlocking games back at Open Gym.

This particular situation is uniquely complicated by the fact that there are two populations who respond to pretty different motivations, said Parker. The things that get an eight year old excited aren’t always the same things that get their parents revved. But one of the approaches that Parker has taken in previous studies is to engage the community in the development process itself. Involving users in the design of technologies can not only ensure that those technologies will have the components they are seeking, but users will also be more likely to want to engage with the technologies. “It can help provide a sense of ownership over the system,” said Parker.

“Her involvement in the Healthy Kids, Healthy Futures team is exciting to us,” said Sceppa. “Her expertise in information and communication technologies will be instrumental in creating long-lasting physical activity promotion opportunities for our families and the neighborhoods HKHF serves.”

Here are a few of my favorite science stories from last week:

According to New Scientist, “The organs of the glass frog, Hyalinobatrachium colymbiphyllum, are visible through its skin.” Photo by Geoff Galice via Flickr.

• I’m sure you didn’t miss it, but a baby born with AIDS has been off medication and symptom free for one year, due to unique actions taken by the doctors attending his birth.
• Turns out Google (and other search engines) isn’t just my brain’s external hard drive. Last week, researchers at Microsoft, Columbia, and Stanford revealed they can use to identify drug side effects not already known to doctors.
• A Q&A with one of my favorite young science writers, Cristy Gelling, on the SA Incubator.
• And here’s the guy that interviewed her, Bora Zivcovic, explaining why daylight savings time is a terrible idea (I am definitely in agreement this morning, although it was pretty sweet to see the sun out so late last night).
• Denis Overbye at the New York Times had a great collection of stories on the Higgs Boson, complete with videos and animated drawings explaining what the heck it is and why scientists are looking for it.
• Another mind boggling concept in physics? Universality. Aatish Bhatia explains it all quite gracefully on his blog, Empirical Zeal.
• A team of atmospheric scientists at University of Colorado Boulder showed that volcanoes are slowing down global warming. But we might not care as much as we used to, because of our collective “green fatigue.”
• Another thing going down? the amount of energy in our “food.” A podcast on Scientific American discusses “how our greatest fuel source became our greatest health threat.”
• Cicadas keep their wings bacteria-free through nano-spikes on their surface that basically poke holes in microbial cells that land on them. It’s the only known structural antibiotic. Pretty cool.
• A “honeybee brain specialist” at Newcastle University in England showed last week that some plants use caffeine to chemically enhance bees’ learning process, luring them back again and again.
• Two independent studies showed that salt makes human and mouse T cells more pathogenic and is linked to increase autoimmune diseases, like multiple sclerosis, in mice. Salt at Fault?
• Another mouse study showed that implanting human brain cells into murine brains helps them…I forget. Oh right, improve memory.
• A genome-wide study of 60,000 people around the world revealed genetic similarities between five major psychiatric disorders: schizophrenia, autism, bipolar disorder, depression, and and ADD. It looks like this news was broken a couple weeks ago, but I just found out about it.
• And finally, three blog posts by George Johnson about Oliver Sacks’ essay, “The Twins,” about two people who could tell uncannily quickly whether very large numbers were prime. They did in a “non-algorithmic way,” suggesting our brains might look something like quantum computers.

Eligibility: Currently enrolled Ph.D. students at Northeastern who have completed all course requirements including comprehensive exams and dissertation proposal defense (if required), and are nearing completion of their dissertation. The fellowships will be awarded on a competitive basis. Each student must provide the following application materials:

1. Letter of application for the fellowship including information about past and current funding from NU or external sources
2. Description of the current state of the student’s dissertation along with a detailed timetable for completion
3. Copy of an approved dissertation prospectus (if required) and evidence that a substantial amount (at least 2/3) of the writing has been completed in draft form
4. Letter of recommendation from the dissertation advisor that describes the importance of the work and indicates when the dissertation will be completed (the letter must be enclosed in a sealed envelope and signed by the recommender) – additional letters are not encouraged
5. Expected date of dissertation defense (highlighted in bold font)
6. Curriculum vitae
7. Documents (other than the letter of recommendation) must be submitted in a single PDF to the Dissertation Completion Fellowship Form. The form will be accessible starting March11th.

The Office of the Provost will form a subcommittee to review applications according to the overall strength of the materials submitted and with regard to the likelihood of timely completion of a quality dissertation. Application packages that are not complete or are late will not be considered and it is the applicant’s responsibility to provide all required materials.

Award: The stipend for one semester will be the larger of either $8,000 or ½ the current academic year stipend rate for the department where the student’s primary affiliation resides. In addition, both the student’s one-credit registration fee and health fees will be covered by the award for the semester. The award must be used during the semester for which it is awarded and may not be deferred. Students are expected to complete their dissertation during the period of the award and may not hold any employment, internal or external, or awards during that term including outside fellowships, research assistant appointments, or teaching assistant appointments. Ph.D. students that are holders of the University Excellence Fellowship are eligible for this award. For students on federal loan, a concurrent DCF award may result in an adjusted loan amount. Please consult the Student Financial Services Offices (sfs@neu.edu) for additional information.

Up to six awards are available for Fall 2013. The application deadline for Fall 2013 awards is March 29, 2013 at 5:00pm.

Please address all letters of recommendation to: Associate Vice Provost for Graduate Education, 110 Churchill Hall.

The standard thinking at the time was that the three main classes of bactericidal antibiotics each had a unique way of killing bacterial cells—like specialized assassins each trained in a single type of weaponry. But this new research suggested that all antibiotics work the same way, by urging bacterial cells to make compounds called reactive oxygen species, or ROS, which bacteria are naturally susceptible to.

“If they were right it would have been an important finding that could have changed the way we treat patients,” said Iris Keren, a senior scientist in Lewis’ lab.

And that’s exactly how science usually works, said Lewis—through challenges to mainstream thinking. But recent results reported by Lewis, Keren, and their research  partners in an article published Friday in the journal Science suggest that this alternative hypothesis doesn’t hold up. For example, even bacteria that are incapable of making ROS are still vulnerable to antibiotics. Further, some antibiotics can work their fatal magic in both aerobic and anaerobic conditions—but reactive oxygen species can only form when there’s oxygen to fuel them.

“We chose to do the simplest and most critical experiment aimed at falsifying this hypothesis,” said Lewis. “Killing by antibiotics is unrelated to ROS production,” the authors wrote. The findings were corroborated by University of Illinois researchers in another study released on Friday .

The team treated bacterial cultures with antibiotics in both the presence and absence of oxygen. Other than the gaseous environment, the two treatments were identical. There was no difference in cell death between the two populations.

Before performing these experiments, Lewis’ team first looked at signals of a fluorescent dye, which previous researchers had used as an indicator for ROS levels. The team treated bacterial cells with a variety of antibiotics and measured the strength of this signal. Since antibiotics were presumed to increase ROS levels, one would have expected increased concentrations of antibiotics to correlate with stronger signals. However, Lewis’ group saw no such correlation.

“But there’s a difference between correlation and direct observation,” Keren said. In order to support their observations with unequivocal data, the team members physically separated the cells that had stronger fluorescent signals from those with weak signals and treated them both with the same antibiotics. Both populations suffered equivalent cell death.

“The research from Dr. Lewis’ group demonstrates that, contrary to current dogma, antibiotics apparently do not kill bacteria through induction of reactive oxygen species,” said Steven Projan, vice president for research and development at iMed and head of Infectious Diseases and Vaccines at MedImmune, both subsidiaries of AstraZeneca. “The results shown are rather clear but still leave us with the mystery as to how antibacterial drugs help infected people clear bacterial infections. At this point, we should probably dispense with the ‘one size fits all’ approach to bacterial killing by antibiotics,” said Projan, who was not involved in the research.

With these results, Lewis and Keren hope the field will be able to focus its efforts on understanding the true mechanisms of how antibiotics wipe out bacteria in order to effectively address chronic bacterial infections, one of the most pressing issues facing public health today.

Marvin Nauman/FEMA photo

When disaster strikes, we rely on our social networks for support. During hurricane Sandy, neighbors helped neighbors by sharing electrical power with those who’d lost it or removing tree limbs from each other’s rooftops. In many cases, the help we get during emergencies comes from whomever happens to be nearby, but more and more our cell phones—if they still work—connect us to more distant resources.

Northeastern professor David Lazer hopes to understand how people behave during disasters through an app he and his team developed for mobile phones, which archive much of that behavior in call and text logs.

The Sandy app is available through the website Volunteer Science, which Lazer and Drew Margolin, a post-doc in his lab, recently launched. It allows users like you and me to participate in research in the form games and apps like the one for Sandy. They hope to eventually see a huge flow of people through the site, playing these sorts of games for fun. After all, the question of how people behaved during Sandy is just one of a limitless number that researchers could ask using this approach.

But back to the Sandy app. Once downloaded, it will ask volunteers to answer questions about their situation during the storm, what resources they needed or provided to others, and how they connected with those they did. It will then reach into the archives, choose ten random calls, and ask questions like “How is this person related to you?” and “Did you get what you needed from this person?”

Post-disaster interviewing is standard protocol for emergency organizations like the Red Cross, but these rely entirely on people’s memories, which are often skewed during times of stress. The new app is “not meant to substitute for other methods, it’s just adding a powerful complement,” said Lazer.

“We think of it as the 21^st century improvement over the interview,” said Margolin, who is leading the project. The method will add valuable data that interviewing alone cannot. For instance, people who had a flood of inbound calls during the storm may have been support-hubs without realizing it.

Previous research has looked at static call detail records, provided by the phone company, which includes things like the cell tower that was accessed and the number that was called. Those studies have revealed distinctive patterns of behavior. For example, the number of calls between people 20 years apart in age increases during emergency situations, suggesting more calls between parents and children.

“But the problem is we can’t ask those people questions about their context,” said Lazer. They can’t ask whether the older person someone called was in fact their parent. “In some ways it’s like one hand clapping. Here we’re trying to supply the context and make a little bit more noise.”

While the app will provide invaluable new information for emergency relief efforts, it will also provide an improvement over current network science research methods. “Trying to build a bridge between the observational data, the massive passive data that’s being created about all of us every day and deeper sociological constructs,” said Lazer. That’s the goal for the whole Volunteer Science platform, he said.

Readers can participate in the Sandy study and encourage New York and New Jersey area friends to do the same by visiting www.volunteerscience.com. The app is currently only available for Android phones.

“It looks like a war zone of the worst kind,” said Matthias Ruth, a professor with dual appointments in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Matthias Ruth is a professor of public policy and engineering. Photo by Brooks Canaday.

Ruth is part of a team of about 20 researchers from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that has studied the aftermath of the Italian earthquake in hopes of teaching other cities how to improve their resilience to major disasters. The research team released a report of their recommendations, “Building Resilient Regions after a National Disaster,” in Rome earlier this month.

“We need to prepare ourselves,” Ruth said. “That’s the intellectual question we have to face: When we rebuild, how do we do that considering the next disaster? Now that we are given the opportunity to rethink and rebuild, how do we do this in a smarter way?”

Planners, engineers, and government officials in L’Aquila have begun rebuilding the ravaged city, Ruth said. They are looking at how to balance its existing nature—a quintessentially Italian community of winding streets, sidewalk cafes, and close quarters—with the needs of a modern city to allow for both resilience against future disasters and an infrastructure that can support a new generation of entrepreneurs and innovation. Some structures will simply not be rebuilt; others may look the same but will be built using entirely new methods and materials.

Work is underway to rebuild L’Aquila, which was devastated by a 2009 earthquake. Photo by Matthias Ruth.

“The big question is, ‘How do we use technology to continue to give the feel of an old city with its own charm and recreate the social fabric and some kind of authenticity, while also incorporating modern materials, sensors, and information technology to make the city a safer place?’” Ruth said. These issues, he said, represent the key challenges facing urban resilience projects, and they align with the larger debate of designing sustainable cities that can evolve with both environmental and social changes.

Ruth said lessons learned in L’Aquila—gathered from more than 400 in-person interviews and intensive landscape surveys and assessments—can be applied to cities in places like New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, all of which were battered by superstorm Sandy. In a sign that Ruth’s report has had far-reaching effect, some officials have announced that destroyed waterfront structures will either not be rebuilt or, in cases like beachfront boardwalks, will be rebuilt out of concrete, not wood like the previous structures.

“This is not just about Italy,” Ruth said. “This is really a piece of the groundwork to be laid for cities all around the world.”

Aoun met separately on Tuesday with U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren—a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions—and Mo Cowan, a 1994 graduate of Northeastern’s School of Law. In his meetings with the new members of Massachusetts’ congressional delegation, Aoun highlighted a broad spectrum of higher-education topics. Among them were the importance of innovation in higher education and finding ways to expand federal funding aimed at work-study programs to also include students working on co-op—the signature program in Northeastern’s experiential-education model.

President Joseph E. Aoun (right) meets with U.S. Rep. John Kline of Minnesota, chair of the House Education and the Workforce Committee.

On Monday, Aoun met with U.S. Rep. John Kline of Minnesota, chair of the House Education and the Workforce Committee. In their meeting, Aoun discussed federal regulation of higher education and stressed the need for Washington’s support of programs that increase student-aid funding and incentivize innovation in higher education. They also discussed the upcoming hearings and expected vote next year to reauthorize the Higher Education Act, which sets the policy in areas such as strengthening colleges and universities’ educational resources and providing financial aid to students.

The meetings come only days after sequestration—a series of automatic, across-the-board cuts to government agencies totaling an estimated $1.2 trillion over 10 years—went into effect. While the full scope of the sequester’s potential impact in areas such as research funding and financial aid programs remains unclear, Northeastern’s preparations for this fiscal reality have been underway for months.

“Accelerating our research enterprise is a top priority for the institution and our research efforts will continue even as the funding landscape becomes more challenging,” Mel Bernstein, senior vice provost for research and graduate education, wrote in a memo last week to Northeastern faculty and staff. Bernstein added that the cuts will not affect the Pell Grant program, nor will it impact the students’ financial aid for now, but that planning is underway to offset any future change.

In Washington, Aoun also chaired the American Council on Education’s annual meeting, where he concluded his one-year term as chair of the ACE board of directors. As board chair, Aoun continued his advocacy for the strength and diversity of the American system of higher education, which he has said must continue to innovate to compete globally and meet the challenges of the 21st century. Aoun will remain an active member on the ACE executive committee.

Northeastern’s president has long taken a leadership role in addressing issues critical to higher education on a national stage. Last year, Aoun was named to a new academic advisory council reporting directly to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that examines how universities can contribute to America’s national security efforts. He has also coordinated efforts with other college presidents to support critical research funding in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security budget, to preserve federal financial aid funding for students, and to urge caution on regulation of unpaid internships at the federal level.