Join us as featured speakers from academia and industry speak on various cutting-edge engineering and research topics spanning multiple engineering disciplines. 

Dr. Lee Makowski is Professor and Chair of Bioengineering and Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Northeastern University. He has a BS in Physics from Brown University and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from MIT. His research interests focus on the molecular basis of biological processes. In 2010, he moved from Argonne National Laboratory where he was Biosciences Division Director and Senior Scientist to Northeastern University where he accepted a joint appointment in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Chemistry and Chemical Biology. In January 2014 Dr. Makowski was appointed as Interim Chair of the newly established Department of Bioengineering and became Chair in September 2015. His current research program aspires to understand the inception and progression of Alzheimer’s disease. With the emergence of COVID-19, he redirected his efforts to try to understand the array of unexpected extrapulmonary impacts SARS CoV-2 has on some patients.

Deb Niemeier is the Clark Distinguished Chair in Energy and Sustainability at the University of Maryland, College Park and serves as a professor in the Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering. She has extensive expertise in understanding the spatial properties of mobile source emissions, developing new methods for improving vehicle emissions inventories, and accelerating the implementation of regulatory guidance to better identify vulnerable populations and environmental health disparities. Her research is currently focused on understanding infrastructure features that give rise to inequitable outcomes in the built environment, particularly with the onset of climate change. In 2014, Niemeier was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for “distinguished contributions to energy and environmental science study and policy development.” In 2015, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow for foundational work on pro bono service in engineering. In 2017, she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Niemeier received a B.S. in civil engineering from the University of Texas (1982), her M.S. from the University of Maine and a Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of Washington (1994).

Andrea Alù is the Founding Director and Einstein Professor at the Photonics Initiative, CUNY Advanced Science Research Center. He received his Laurea (2001) and PhD (2007) from the University of Roma Tre, Italy, and, after a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania, he joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin in 2009, where he was the Temple Foundation Endowed Professor until Jan. 2018. Dr. Alù is a Fellow of NAI, IEEE, AAAS, OSA, SPIE and APS, and has received several scientific awards, including the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award, the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship from DoD, the ICO Prize in Optics, the NSF Alan T. Waterman award, the OSA Adolph Lomb Medal, and the URSI Issac Koga Gold Medal.

Professor Sidi A. Bencherif received a Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University in 2009. Following his PhD, he was initially appointed from 2009 to 2012 as a postdoctoral researcher and later from 2012 as a research associate in the laboratory of Prof. David Mooney at Harvard University and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. In 2016, he joined the department of Chemical Engineering at Northeastern University as an Assistant Professor. His research interests include developing naturally derived biomaterials that can be used for tissue engineering, drug delivery, immunotherapy, and studies into fundamental cell-biomaterial interactions. Prof. Bencherif has authored and co-authored over 50 journal articles in top journals (Science, PNAS, Nature Materials, etc), international conference proceedings, reviews and patent applications, and is the recipient of several fellowships, honors and awards.

Josep Miquel Jornet is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the director of the Ultrabroadband Nanonetworking (UN) Laboratory, and a member of the Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things at Northeastern University. He received a degree in Telecommunication Engineering and a Master of Science in Information and Communication Technologies from Barcelona School of Telecommunications Engineering (ETSETB), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain, in 2008. From September 2007 to December 2008, he was a visiting researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, under the MIT Sea Grant program. He received a Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, in August 2013. Between August 2013 and August 2019, he was in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.

His current research interests are in Terahertz communication networks, wireless nano-bio-communication networks, and the Internet of Nano-Things. In these areas, he has co-authored more than 160 peer-reviewed scientific publications, including 1 book and 3 US patents. His work has received more than 8,200 citations (h-index of 41 as of September 2020). Since July 2016, he has been the Editor-in-Chief of Elsevier’s Nano Communication Networks Journal. He is serving as the lead PI on multiple grants from U.S. federal agencies including the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). He received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2019 and is the recipient of several other awards from IEEE, ACM, and UB.