Ahuja to Participate in The Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering Symposium
Professor Karan Ahuja is one of 74 outstanding early-career engineers selected
Northwestern Engineering’s Karan Ahuja has been selected to participate in The Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering (FOE) 2026 Symposium, a signature activity of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) scheduled for September 21–24 and hosted at the University of Texas at Austin in conjunction with Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Additional sponsors for the 2026 US FOE are the U.S. National Science Foundation and Cummins.
Ahuja, the Lisa Wissner-Slivka and Benjamin Slivka Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the McCormick School of Engineering, is one of 74 outstanding early-career engineers who will meet for an intensive two-and-a-half-day symposium to discuss developments in four areas:
- Innovation in Bioengineered Materials
- Compute Challenges for Artificial Intelligence
- Agriculture as a System-of-Systems: From Molecules to Markets
- Hypersonics
The goal of the Frontiers of Engineering program is to bring together engineers performing exceptional research and technical work in a variety of disciplines and from industry, academia, and government to facilitate cross-disciplinary exchange and promote the transfer of new techniques and approaches across fields to sustain and build US innovative capacity.
“Engineering has always been a force for progress, but its role is becoming even more vital as society faces increasingly complex and interconnected challenges,” said NAE President Tsu-Jae Liu in a news release. “The NAE aims to strengthen engineering leadership to benefit the nation and improve lives by advancing excellence, fostering collaboration across sectors and disciplines, and preparing engineers to lead with creativity, rigor, and purpose.”
Leveraging techniques in novel sensors and sensing techniques, embedded systems, signal processing, computer vision, and on-device machine learning, Ahuja’s Sensing, Perception, Interactive Computing & Experiences (SPICE) Lab develops cutting-edge computing technologies that sense, track, and understand humans to augment their interactions and assist them in daily life.
“Some of the best research happens when disciplines collide, and Northwestern's breadth across departments makes that collaboration natural. Frontiers of Engineering brings that same dynamic to a national stage, convening the most talented early-career engineers from academia, industry, and government," Ahuja said. "I'm looking forward to learning from them and bringing our machine learning and sensing expertise toward deploying systems at scale that address real societal challenges.”