Monday, December 22, 2008

Defense department picks Northeastern research for $200K award

By Brendan Lynch

A Northeastern University researcher is among 15 winners of Presidential Early Career Awards from the U.S. Department of Defense.

Purnima Ratilal, assistant professor in Northeastern University’s department of electrical and computer engineering, was chosen after being nominated by the U.S. Navy for her work on acoustics and remote sensing. Ratilal and each of the 14 other recipients will receive $200,000 a year for five years. The Award is intended to recognize promising young faculty at universities involved in basic research of importance to the Department of Defense.

Ratilal has also won the Office of Naval Research’s Young Investigator Award in 2007, the R. Bruce Lindsay Award in 2006, and the Office of Naval Research’s Postdoctoral Award in Ocean Acoustics from 2002 to 2004.  

At the end of October, Northeastern launched its Homeland Security Center of Excellence for Awareness and Localization of Explosives-Related Threats (ALERT), a joint venture with the University of Rhode Island. The schools are splitting a four-year, $2 million-per-year U.S. Department of Homeland Security grant. An additional $1.6 million has been granted by the John Adams Innovation Institute, earmarked for collaboration with local companies such as American Science and Engineering Inc. and Raytheon Co.

The same month, Northeastern health sciences professor Vladimir Torchilin landed a $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for research on nanoscale pharmaceuticals. Under the grant, from the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute, Torchilin will investigate ways to increase the effectiveness of nanocarrier-based pharmaceuticals for drug and gene therapy.

Also in October, Northeastern’s Barnett Institute of Chemical and Biological Analysis received a $3 million donation from Louis Barnett and his family. The $3 million gift was given to allow the Barnett Institute — along with biotech industry collaborators — to build the new Center for Advanced Regulatory Analysis (CARA).

In July, the National Science Foundation gave the NSF Center for High-rate Nanomanufacturing $12.4 million in continued funding. The center, a collaboration among the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Northeastern University and the University of New Hampshire, was established in 2004 with another $12.4 million grant from the NSF.