Dear colleagues, alumni, and friends,
In this fall newsletter, we are sharing with you some recent achievements of faculty, students, and postdocs of Northwestern’s Department of Engineering Science and Applied Mathematics. To mention three particular highlights: Professor Petia Vlahovska received the highly prestigious TRAILBLAZER award from the National Science Foundation; in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Chicago, Professor Madhav Mani and his former student Siqi Liu published a paper in Nature revealing a simple mathematical description of the metabolism of the complex biome of thousands of soil microorganisms; and Joseph Hibdon (PhD ’11) was named the first rotating associate director of the National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology.
As always, this newsletter aims to strengthen our ties with friends and alumni of the department. We’d love to hear from you as well—please keep us informed about your professional milestones.
Hermann RieckeProfessor and ChairDepartment of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics
McCormick School of Engineering
Vlahovska Receives NSF TRAILBLAZER Award
The $3 million award is supporting Professor Petia Vlahovska’s research into brain-machine interfaces and neuroprosthetics.
Simple Rules Govern Soil Microbiome Responses to Environmental Change
Research from a team with Professor Madhav Mani, ESAM PhD graduate and former Northwestern postdoctoral researcher Siqi Liu (PhD '13), and University of Chicago scientists shows how environmental changes lead to predictable responses in soil microbiome metabolism.
Hibdon Named First Rotating Associate Director at NITMB
Joseph Hibdon (PhD '11) will lead efforts to enhance the National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology’s convening programs, including workshops, collaborative meetings, and interdisciplinary research programs.
Watch: 2025 Stephen H. Davis Lecture
This year's keynote lecture "Self-Organization, Flows, and Transport in (and of) Living Cells" was delivered Oct. 27 by Michael Shelley, director of the Center for Computational Biology at the Flatiron Institute and Lyttle Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Courant Institute of New York University. WATCH
Order from Disordered Proteins
A team with Professor Krishna Shrinivas designed a computational framework using machine learning algorithms to design intrinsically disordered protein sequences with desired behaviors or properties that directly inverts over physics-based models.
Department News
PhD students Olga Lev-Kiedrowska, Sophia Nelson, and Solomon Valore-Caplan won the department’s Outstanding Teaching Assistant Awards.
The following ESAM graduates have started new positions and endeavors in the past year:
- Jeff Beck (PhD ‘03) became an AI startup technical consultant after having been CEO and chief technical officer at Noumenal Labs.
- Cheryl Hile (PhD ‘93) retired from her position as a teaching professor at Penn State University to focus on her company, Understand the Math LLC.
- Michael Levinson (MS ‘13) was named chief technology officer at The Maypole Group and at Översätta.
- Rachel Trana (PhD ‘12) became the director of product engineering at Grainger.