Principal Investigators

Prof. Jerome F. Hajjar - Northeastern University

Jerome Hajjar is the CDM Smith Professor and Chair in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University. He is the director of the STReSS laboratory at Northeastern University. He received his BS in Engineering Mechanics from Yale University and his MS and PhD in Structural Engineering from Cornell University. He has also worked as an engineering consultant at Skidmore, Owings & Merill in New York and Chicago. He served as a Professor at the University of Minnesota from 1992 and 2005 and as a Professor and Narbey Khachaturian Faculty Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2005 to 2010. His research interests include experimental testing, computation simulation, steel and composite structures, structural stability, earthquake engineering analysis, and sustainable structures.

Prof. Taskin Padir - Northeastern University

Taskin Padir is an Associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University where he serves as the Director of the Robotics and Intelligent Vehicles Research Laboratory (RIVeR Lab). He received his BS in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the Middle East Technical University and his MS and PhD from Purdue University. His research interests include humanoid robots, model-based robot design, and human-supervised robot autonomy.

Prof. Peter Boynton - Northeastern University

Peter Boynton is an Affiliate professor of the Practice in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University and CEO of the George J. Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security at Northeastern University, LLC.  He served as the Commissioner of Emergency Management and Homeland Security of Connecticut. He also served as a Director on the White House National Security Council staff and served within the Department of State. Boynton received his Master’s Degree in Public Administration from Harvard and his Bachelor’s Degree in Ocean Engineering from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy.

Prof. Stephen Flynn - Northeastern University

Stephen Flynn is a Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University and founder and director of the Global Resilience Institute at Northeastern University. He served in the White House Military Office under President George H.W. Bush and as a director for Global Issues on the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton. Flynn served as an expert advisor to U.S. Commission on National Security. Following 9/11, he was the executive director of a blue-ribbon Council on Foreign Relations homeland security task force. He served as a member of the National Research Council’s Marine Board from 2003-2010. In 2011, he served as the president of the Center for National Policy. He received his M.A.L.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University.

Graduate Students

Yujie Yan - Ph.D. - Northeastern University

Unver Akmandor - Ph.D - Northeastern University

Zhong Mao - Ph.D - Northeastern University

Aravind Uthaman - M.S. - Northeastern University

Jiahao Wu - M.S. - Northeastern University

Undergraduate Students

Nicholas Anderson

Kimberly Kuhn

Jialu Tang