Mahdi Hosseini Receives ASEE 2026 Curtis W. McGraw Research Award
The ASEE award recognizes the significant achievements of early career researchers and educators
Northwestern Engineering’s Mahdi Hosseini has received the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) 2026 Curtis W. McGraw Research Award in the PhD granting program category.
Established in 1957 with the initial assistance of the McGraw-Hill Book Company, the Curtis W. McGraw Research Award recognizes the significant achievements of early career researchers and educators. Recipients demonstrate sound and productive thinking, a promise for making significant contributions to their field of specialization, and outstanding research abilities, including discoveries and other original contributions to engineering fundamentals.
“I’m humbled to receive this national recognition,” said Hosseini, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering. “What makes this award particularly meaningful to me is its emphasis on both research excellence and the education and mentorship of future engineers. Knowing that ASEE represents the full breadth of engineering—and that this award is given each year to only one faculty member from a PhD-granting institution across the country—makes this recognition especially humbling.”
A leader in quantum engineering, Hosseini has driven a series of foundational advances in quantum memory, atom–photon interfaces, quantum sensing, and collective interactions in quantum photonic systems. His team has demonstrated world-record efficiency in quantum light storage, produced the first quantum thermal images using squeezed light, and more recently achieved record-high acceleration sensitivity through diamagnetic levitation of macroscopic objects.
Hosseini’s Quantum Atom Optics research group investigates the intricate dynamics of light-atom interactions in various platforms, including rare-earth crystals, room-temperature gases, and nanophotonic structures. The team aims to develop scalable quantum memory and quantum photonic platforms that enable high-fidelity storage, manipulation, and transmission of quantum optical information, particularly at telecom wavelengths.
In collaboration with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Northwestern Engineering’s David Barton and Koray Aydin, Hosseini’s group is engineering collective and geometry-dependent light–matter interactions in rare-earth–doped solid-state systems to achieve enhanced coherence, efficiency, and controllable radiative properties. This work will advance long-distance quantum communication, integrated quantum networking, and quantum repeater technologies by delivering practical, high-performance quantum memories compatible with fiber-optic infrastructure.
“By engineering geometry-assisted collective light-atom interactions and the photonic environment of quantum centers, the project introduces new design principles for scalable quantum photonic devices, enabling higher efficiency, longer coherence times, and new capabilities in quantum communication, sensing, and distributed quantum computing,” Hosseini said.
Supported by a 2025 grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation, Hosseini and Professor Selim Shahriar aim to build and test an ultra-sensitive optomechanical system to determine whether quantum mechanics is linear or non-linear and whether gravity behaves classically or quantum mechanically.
In 2024, Hosseini received the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award. He earned the US National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award in 2022.
Hosseini was honored with the Curtis W. McGraw Research Award in absentia today at the annual business meeting of the ASEE Engineering Research Council.