George J. Kostas, E’43, H’07, a visionary, patriot, and “son of Northeastern” whose investments have significantly advanced the university’s research in nanotechnology and homeland security, died Friday. He was 97.

Kostas’ longstanding relationship with Northeastern included a commitment to expanding the university’s research enterprise in areas of particular global significance. He invested $2 million to found and establish the George J. Kostas Nanoscale Technology and Manufacturing Research Center, and later made a $12 million investment to create the Northeastern’s George J. Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security.

“George was a patriot, not merely in name, but in his deeds,” said Joseph E. Aoun, president of Northeastern. “His leadership transformed Northeastern and transformed the lives of all those, present and future, who work or learn under the institute and research center that proudly bear his name. His unflagging intellect and quest for humanity’s betterment will inspire discoveries there for generations to come.”

On the day of the Kostas Research Institute’s groundbreaking ceremony in September 2010, Kostas said, “This is one of the happiest days of my life.” The following year, the university opened the 70,000-square-foot secure, state-of-the-art facility.

George J. Kostas and President Joseph E. Aoun at the Kostas Research Institute’s groundbreaking in 2010. Photo by Mary Knox Merrill/Northeastern University

Kostas’ forward-thinking investments not only underscored his commitment to supporting research that addresses great societal challenges, but also paved the way for growth and discoveries that have multiplied the impact of his gifts many times over. Work at the George J. Kostas Nanoscale Technology and Manufacturing Research Center, for example, led the National Science Foundation to create a national center of excellence at Northeastern.

Kostas had an “innate hunger for knowledge” and “a profound loyalty and dedication to country,” said David Luzzi, Northeastern’s vice provost for research, innovation, and development and vice president of the Northeastern University Innovation Campus in Burlington, Massachusetts.

His legacy is not just the individual things he did, but what he showed—that is, how profoundly transformative one great son of the university who is willing to invest his time, his ideas, his generosity, and his vision can be to enabling the present and future success of the university.
—David Luzzi

Kostas’ lifetime commitment to Northeastern amounted to more than $17 million.

“His legacy is not just the individual things he did, but what he showed—that is, how profoundly transformative one great son of the university who is willing to invest his time, his ideas, his generosity, and his vision can be to enabling the present and future success of the university,” Luzzi said.

Luzzi noted that Friday, the day Kostas died, also marked the completion of construction of the facility at the Kostas Research Institute for state-of-the-art electron microscopes, which was supported by his most recent gifts. These instruments will provide important capabilities for characterization of materials and devices at the nanoscale.

George J. Kostas’ Northeastern yearbook portrait, 1943.

Born Sept. 2, 1919, Kostas was a native of Haverhill, Massachusetts, and the son of Greek immigrants. He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering at Northeastern in 1943 and completed the executive MBA program at Columbia University in 1967. In 2007, he received an honorary doctorate of science from Northeastern.

Upon graduation from Northeastern and at a time when the U.S. saw its supply of natural rubber from Southeast Asia cut off by Axis powers at the start of World War II, he was recruited to the U.S. Synthetic Rubber program while at its embryonic stage. Within a few years, American trucks, tanks, and planes were rolling to victory on petroleum-derived tires.

Luzzi said that Kostas viewed Northeastern as playing a critical role in the formative stages of his adult and professional life, adding that it was Kostas’ work at Northeastern for which he was selected to join the Army-led synthetic rubber program.

In 1946, Kostas was promoted to the General Tire and Rubber Corporation’s director of research and development for synthetic elastomers. The following year, he was named to the 12-member U.S. Research and Development Committee for Synthetic Rubber, on which he served until it dissolved in 1955.

He later founded in 1972 and served as president of Techno-Economic Services, Inc. Under his direction, Tesco developed “Xenoclad,” a revolutionary process based on his patents to plate aluminum in an atomic form on metal substrates to render them resistant to corrosion.

When it comes to addressing security issues, we cannot forget the human factor, says David Luzzi, vice provost for research innovation and development and vice president of Northeastern’s Innovation Campus. “The network is the cloud but we, all of us, represent the tactical edge of the network—where cyberspace and physical space connect.” Luzzi’s remarks came as part of the opening of the Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex on April 3. Video by Benjamin Bertsch and Adam Fischer/Northeastern University

Stephen Flynn Professor of Political Science, Founding Director of the Global Resilience Institute See More

Today, Northeastern will launch the Global Resilience Institute, which will lead interdisciplinary research and initiatives that advance societal resilience and contribute to the health, security, and sustainability of societies around the world.

But just what is resilience? And how will the Global Resilience Institute help build a more flexible, nimble world in the face of growing global turbulence? These are a few of the questions we asked the institute’s founding director Stephen E. Flynn, professor of political science with affiliated appointments in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Flynn offered his expertise here, as well as at the Global Resilience Institute launch event, Tuesday at 1:15 p.m. in the Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex.

We hear a lot about resilience, but what is it, exactly?

Resilience refers to the ability to withstand changing conditions and to both recover rapidly and to adapt when disruptive events occur.

Bolstering resilience requires a comprehensive approach. Various academic disciplines have tended to think about resilience in related but distinctive ways. Engineers often think of resilience as being embedded in infrastructure and systems so when they are put under stress—such as from an earthquake—they won’t fail. Emergency managers define resilience as being able to recover when disasters strike. And increasingly, scientists involved with sustainability see resilience as the capacity to successfully adapt in the face of changes to the climate that might be slowed, but can’t be stopped.

The insights provided by multiple disciplines animates the approach we’re taking at the Global Resilience Institute: Resilience is a concept to which virtually every discipline can contribute knowledge—knowledge that will be helpful for managing the challenge of 21^st century turbulence.

What makes a focus on resilience so timely is that we are increasingly witnessing the potential downside of our becoming more and more connected on multiple levels. Our growing interconnectedness is resulting in new dependencies and interdependencies that make us particularly vulnerable to disruptive events ranging from cyberattacks to pandemics. When a shock hits one locale or one node, it ends up cascading across the entire system, the entire network, affecting our whole society, sometimes with catastrophic consequences.

Why is it so important to take an interdisciplinary approach to studying resilience?

First, advancing societal resilience must occur on multiple levels. The most basic level is the individual—individuals need to have a better ability to cope with disruption and risk. The next is the neighborhood and community level—these shocks tend to impact more than one of us, and we’ll need to draw on the social capital of community to cope. (Think “Boston Strong” after the Boston Marathon bombings or banding together to deal with “Snowmageddon” in the winter of 2014-15). Finally, there’s a societal level that includes lifeline infrastructures like the power grid, the transportation system, the health sector, and so on. Building individual, community, and system resilience requires expertise ranging from psychology to network science, environmental engineering to public policy and law.

As a stepping-off point for our work, we ask, “What is keeping us from being resilient? What are the barriers?” There are five.

1. The first is a science barrier: We don’t understand as well as we need to the interdependencies of the systems and networks on which we rely, with the result that we are too often blindsided when shocks play across them. This requires good models, grounded in fundamental science that can support decisions.
2. The second is an engineering and urban planning barrier: Historically, we have invested in designs that improve efficiency and safety. Now we need to design structures, systems, and networks to be adaptive to a rapidly changing environment, to include the means for self-healing so that they can come back stronger after a shock.
3. The third is an economics barrier: We can have the best and most resilient models and designs, but nobody is going to adopt them unless there are incentives for doing so.
4. The fourth is a public policy and governance barrier: We’ve organized ourselves around jurisdictions, or sectors, but we don’t have an adequate planning and operational structure in place that can respond to the reality that the systems we rely on are interconnected and spread over regional, national, and international boundaries.
5. The fifth is an education barrier: We’re not educating and training people to understand resilience and to work on deploying it at these multiple levels.

How is Northeastern uniquely positioned to break down these barriers?

There is cutting-edge research within and across all of Northeastern’s nine colleges that can uniquely contribute to overcoming these barriers. There are researchers in network science examining our interconnectedness; lawyers who understand the role of regulations and codes; political scientists who study public policy; marine and earth scientists studying the effects of climate change and urban-coastal sustainability; and so much more. Really, to take on any of the major strategic challenges that are confronting our global community today, you need collaborative efforts across the entire university.

Over the past decade, Northeastern has been focusing on discovering the solutions to global challenges in health, security, and sustainability. The university’s new strategic plan adds resilience, innovation, and entrepreneurship as areas where Northeastern will be bringing its research efforts to a new level. Resilience not only leverages the contributions researchers have been making toward these global challenges, but provides a focus for integrating these efforts as well.

This is what the Global Resilience Institute is really about—finding a way to knit together the learning and collaborative research happening within each discipline in order to build resilience on a broader, more cohesive scale. I know of no other university that is better positioned to lead on the issue of resilience than Northeastern.

What role will the Global Resilience Institute play in furthering resilience research and practice?

The institute will have three roles. First, it will help identify and stimulate interdisciplinary research already underway at the university that will help us address individual, community, and systems resilience. In other words, the institute will play an important role in catalyzing this research across the university community.

The second is the in-house work we’re doing that draws on the funding support we’ve received from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to advance an understanding of resilience that can mitigate the effects of disasters and help impacted communities to recover. This work builds on major projects we have undertaken following disasters such as Superstorm Sandy and “Snowmageddeon,” among others.

The third role is providing linkages and leadership to the top research centers and universities around the world—including the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany and others—who are doing cutting-edge research in specific areas of resilience. Northeastern is committed to building a research network that allows lessons to be shared across national borders. The only way we can meet this urgent global imperative is to take it on globally.

Across these roles we are relying on the hard work of many terrific Northeastern undergraduate co-ops and graduate student researchers. It’s important for us not only to advance our own work, but also to help train the next generation of resilience leaders.

Does the 21st century present particular challenges for resilience?

The timing for this couldn’t be better and couldn’t be more urgent. We’re facing a period of growing turbulence, too much of which has been self-inflicted. Our natural environment has become more volatile, our interconnectedness has created a new vulnerability, the threat of bad actors is increasingly prevalent, and our reliance on technology has spawned new cybersecurity threats. From a hazards standpoint, we’ve got a lot to deal with.

The other piece that’s equally urgent is overcoming a misguided mindset that has become more deeply embedded in our body politic over the past 50 years. After World War II, Americans started to believe that if we applied enough muscle, enough money, and enough intellect, we could eliminate risk. That became our focus: to do whatever it takes to get the risk down to zero. The downside of that was that we started neglecting our longstanding capacity to deal with risk when it manifested itself—something we were really good at as a society up through World War II.

Those who first came to America weren’t running away from adversity—they were willingly taking on risk. Sailing across the Atlantic Ocean was extremely dangerous and wasn’t something that a sane person probably should have done in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. The pioneers who pushed westward knew that dangers lay before them. Every generation of Americans was confronted with adversity. And they overcame that adversity, bestowing to their children and grandchildren a sense of optimism and confidence in our individual and collective capacities to build a better world and a brighter future. In recent years, we have been squandering this resilience legacy. So, the race is on to reclaim and strengthen it.

Northeastern on Wednesday unveiled NanoOPS Gen 2, the university’s second-generation-nanoscale offset printing system. The pioneering manufacturing technology is designed to drive innovation in fields such as medicine, electronics, and energy storage.

NanoOPS Gen 2 is housed at the George J. Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security at the university’s Innovation Campus in Burlington, Massachusetts. It can print 1,000 times faster and 1,000 smaller circuits—down to a 20 nanometer—than inkjet-based printing systems on the market today, according to Ahmed Busnaina, University Distinguished Professor and the William Lincoln Smith Chair Professor in the College of Engineering.

University leaders and researchers joined representatives from industry and government agencies at the unveiling ceremony in Burlington.

Busnaina, who directs Northeastern’s Center for High-Rate Nanomanufacturing, said this second-generation system is modular and can print multiple layers at a time and on larger substrates than the first NanoOPS. The abilities to use a wider variety of organic and inorganic materials and have much more precise control of the manufacturing process are among other advances from the first version unveiled three years ago.

Busnaina said researchers are using NanoOPS to develop a variety of materials for industry partners, from biosensors, to medical implantable devices, to electronics. In one project, they are developing sensors for California-based Flex that monitor athletes’ glucose levels through their sweat.

Northeastern collaborated with Massachusetts-based Milara Inc., to design NanoOPS Gen 2.

The system was developed through Northeastern’s Advanced Nanomanufacturing Cluster for Smart Sensors and Materials, directed by Busnaina and established last year through a state grant from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative’s Collaborative Research and Development Matching Grant Program. That grant was matched by nearly $11 million in outside funds between academia, industry, and government.

David Luzzi, vice president for the Northeastern University Innovation Campus and vice provost for research innovation and development, said NanoOPS Gen 2 is the latest example of the vision to establish partnerships between academia, industry, and government to advance technology for the nation’s benefit. “Partnerships have become absolutely core to the new DNA of this campus,” he said.

Patrick Larkin, director of the Innovation Institute at the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, also underscored the value of such partnerships. He called NanoOPS Gen 2 “a revolutionary piece of equipment which will build the next-generation of smart sensors, materials, and electronics.”

“Northeastern really is an institution that understands the meaning of R&D,” Larkin said, “[and] allows researchers to explore the frontiers of science and engineering while at the same time keeping an eye on practical applications for the world.”

The Army Research Laboratory has located its Northeast regional hub at Northeastern University’s George J. Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security, it was announced Monday morning. The partnership will place Army Research Lab staff with university researchers and other regional partners to work on innovative technologies aimed at keeping the nation’s warfighters safe on the battlefield. The move is part of ARL’s extended campus program where the co-located teams are able to bring multiple perspectives into developing homeland security and defense technologies and bring them out of the labs and onto the battlefields at an accelerated speed.

Northeastern was selected as the host for ARL Northeast due to the university’s expertise in defense and homeland security research, including cybersecurity and materials research, as well as its commitment to defense and homeland security research and strong track record of establishing unique and innovative partnerships with industry leaders and other academic institutions.

ARL Northeast will leverage expertise and facilities throughout the Northeast region to accelerate research and innovation. Specific to Northeastern, the partnership is expected to build upon the university’s existing work in areas such as tactical shelters and drones.

Northeastern and the Army Research Lab leaders were joined by elected officials and representatives from higher education, industry, and the military for the announcement, which was held at Northeastern’s Innovation Campus in Burlington, Massachusetts.

“We have an enormous responsibility,” said Joseph E. Aoun, president of Northeastern University. “This responsibility is to be a convener, to bring the best and brightest from the universities, from Hanscom [Air Force Base], from [the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Systems Center], and from industry to work together to make this nation evermore secure and to make this nation No. 1 in the world when it comes to security. We can do it together.”

Melissa Flagg will serve as the leader of ARL Northeast. Through this partnership, ARL staff will be located on-site at the Kostas Research Institute in order to tap into defense-related research and innovation taking place at Northeastern, in Massachusetts, and across the Northeast.

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker noted that a year ago he visited Northeastern’s Burlington campus to announce a $3 million state grant to lead a university-industry partnership focused on developing smart sensors and nanomaterials to be used for a range of medical, defense, and energy applications. He said he was pleased that ARL is recognizing the Kostas Research Institute as the ideal location to advance its own work.

“Congratulations to all of you for the big signal this sends by having the ARL decide to put its Northeast location here in the commonwealth,” Baker said.

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory is part of the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command. ARL Northeast is the fourth and final extended campus location announcement, following the establishment of campuses at the University of Texas (ARL South), the University of Southern California (ARL West), and the University of Chicago (ARL Central).

“I see the basic research being done now at ARL and its partners as the foundation of the capabilities for the future force that we will need,” said Maj. Gen. Cedric T. Wins, commanding general of the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command. He noted the importance of keeping technology in the pipeline, and said he looks forward to developing lasting relationships from this partnership to strengthen both the Army and the nation.

The Massachusetts congressional delegation in attendance—U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey, and U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton—emphasized the importance of public-private collaborations such as ARL Northeast and underscored the need to keep pace globally on innovation and research to ensure national security.

Warren said that as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, she sees everyday “the importance at the intersection between our defense work and our research work, and how this is what protects America’s future.”

Markey hailed Northeastern’s focus on applied research “and making it work in the real world,” adding that housing ARL Northeast at Northeastern will “be paying big dividends for the Army and for the security of our country for generations to come.”

Moulton, a Marine Corps veteran who represents the Massachusetts 6th Congressional District that includes Burlington, noted his excitement that Massachusetts is bringing together the best in academia, leadership, and public-private partnerships “to ensure the survival of success and liberty here at home and around the globe.”

Northeastern’s Kostas Research Institute was designed in accordance with Department of Defense standards and gives Northeastern the capability and clearances to conduct restricted-area research in arenas critical to national security—including materials, additive and nano manufacturing, cybersecurity, autonomous systems, electromagnetics, cryptography, data security, explosives detection, and energy storage and harvesting.

Located on a former U.S. Army Nike missile base site, the Kostas Research Institute was funded by a $12 million investment from alumnus George J. Kostas, E’43, H’07. In his remarks, Aoun highlighted that industry-academic partnerships were an integral part of Kostas’ vision for the institute. The institute, which officially opened in 2011, would go beyond advancing security science and research—it would also enable industry-academic partnerships.

David Luzzi, vice president for the Northeastern University Innovation Campus and vice provost for research innovation and development, said the Kostas Research Institute is committed to results-driven partnerships with government, industry, and other universities aimed at solving the grand challenges in defense and homeland security. He said Rogers Corporation was the institute’s original corporate partner, and that 17 companies are now active at the Burlington campus.

“Today’s most forward-looking government laboratories, corporations, and research universities recognize that going alone doesn’t get the job done anymore,” Luzzi said. “It is partnerships that are critical, and if you’re going to move things from technology in the research lab to application, these partnerships become essential.”

Northeastern’s commitment to the military is underscored not only by its myriad research projects and partnerships, but also by the support it gives to the ROTC program, service members, and veterans. The university’s Veterans Memorial is located in the heart of campus on Neal F. Finnegan Plaza. In the past few years alone, Northeastern has launched the Dolce Center for the Advancement of Veterans and Servicemembers; opened a Veterans of Foreign Wars post—the first to be opened in Massachusetts since 2009 and only the second in the nation to be led by student veterans on a college campus; and secured a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory to conduct critical defense research, specifically in designing and developing advanced engineered materials.

As cyberattacks become an increasing security threat to unmanned aircraft systems, military planners are seeking ways to protect them from enemy threats. Northeastern now offers one of the few facilities in Massachusetts to test drones against wireless signal jamming, spoofing, and other enemy interference techniques.

On Tuesday, Northeastern’s brand-new flight facility for unmanned autonomous systems was put to use for the first time with the launch of an octocopter drone. Because the netted enclosure at the George J. Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security in Burlington, Massachusetts is considered equivalent to an indoor flight facility, researchers will be able to test drones safely without being limited by Federal Aviation Administration restrictions.

The drone cage—which stands more than five stories tall and is 150 feet wide by 200 feet long—is large enough for two research groups to fly different drones simultaneously. This is a major upgrade from the empty classrooms researchers had to rely on for flight tests before the enclosure was built, said Matthew T. Kling, senior research engineer and scientist at the Kostas Research Institute.

Kling said the facility will also include a “one-of-a-kind, state-of-the-art” indoor space, which will house a custom-built anechoic chamber—a room designed to completely absorb electromagnetic waves. This is an unusual facility in that it allows researchers to create “an arbitrary wireless environment,” and it’s large enough to fly drones within the chamber itself. The indoor space is currently under construction and will be complete by fall 2018.

Researchers will be able to use the chamber to simulate hostile environments the military might face, Kling said. For example, a drone flying into enemy territory might be attacked by way of wireless interference. At the new facility, researchers will be able to deliberately attack their own drones, safely and accurately simulating enemy threats. Then, they can develop countermeasures to defend against those attacks.

There will also be a netted corridor connecting the indoor and outdoor areas when the site is fully complete. This will allow drones to navigate from one environment to the other, so researchers can test different flight control and sensor mechanisms, Kling said.

On Tuesday, Aurora Flight Sciences, a company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, launched its octocopter drone for the first flight at the new outdoor facility. Aurora is a company within the project portfolio of Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, an organization within the Department of Defense.

“Netted cages of this size are very hard to come by—particularly in this area—and places to fly prototypes in general are really hard to come by,” said Andrew Musto, a project manager at Defense Innovation Unit Experimental. “All of the capabilities combined make it a very appealing location.”

Several labs at Northeastern are ready to test drones at the new site. For example, Jerome Hajjar, CDM Smith Professor and chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern, directs the STReSS Lab at the Kostas Research Institute. He is working with Taskin Padir, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, to develop unmanned autonomous systems to test the safety of buildings, bridges, and other structures. Their vision is a swarm of drones that work cooperatively together to assess damage after disasters.

The new facility is a tangible example of the mission at Kostas Research Institute, Kling said.

“It’s bringing together government, commercial industry and academia to work on solving really tough problems.”

BURLINGTON, Massachusetts—Northeastern formally opened a state-of-the-art research facility at a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Monday that was attended by military and business leaders who will partner with the university in cyber-security testing on drones.

The Kostas Research Institute/Northeastern University Expeditionary Cyber and Unmanned Aerial System Research and Development Facility was funded by the United States Navy Office of Naval Research.

Presiding over the ceremony, from left: Air Force Colonel Timothy Lawrence, Steve Wert of PEO Digital, Richard Carlin of the Office of Naval Research, Rep. Lori Trahan of Massachusetts, Northeastern vice president of the Innovation Campus and senior vice provost for research David Luzzi. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University

The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center is providing a $2.8 million grant to fund research through its unit at Hanscom Air Force Base, which is a short drive from Northeastern’s Innovation Campus in suburban Boston. The collaborative partnership between Hanscom and Northeastern enables the Air Force to adapt to the rapidly changing commercial market for autonomous and unmanned aircraft systems, known as UAS.

“This is the future,” Colonel Timothy Lawrence, director of the Information Directorate at the Air Force Research Laboratory, told the ceremony audience. “Right now, counter-UAS is a huge problem … having Northeastern—with this facility—work this problem is what the nation needs.”

The ceremony was attended by Congresswoman Lori Trahan of Massachusetts, who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, which crafts the budget for the Department of Defense, as well as the Subcommittee on Intelligence and Emerging Threats and Capabilities. Her presence underlined the need for cyber-security measures to deal with the threats of the drones of potential adversaries operating within the U.S.

“Fundamentally, we are celebrating the power of partnership,” Trahan said. “We need to make sure that the Defense Department is leveraging the incredible talent pool and capability that we have here in Massachusetts to create innovative solutions for a real-world application.”

The $2.8 million grant from Hanscom Air Force Base will enable Northeastern and other industry partners to rapidly assess and develop new drone technologies emerging from the commercial marketplace. Northeastern and the Air Force plan to build upon this spirit of collaboration by creating a DevOps center.

The facility has the futuristic aesthetics of a science-fiction movie. Its walls, floor and ceiling, which measure 50 feet by 50 feet with 22 feet of headroom, are lined with hundreds of blue protruding arrowheads, made of foam, which are designed to absorb radio frequency waves. They transform the square room into an anechoic chamber that will enable Air Force and private researchers to join with Northeastern and other universities in the creation of defenses against potential drone attacks.

On Monday, flooring was installed to enable the ceremony to be held within the facility, which is also encased with a Faraday cage of conducting material that creates an electromagnetic shield. Attendees watched a demonstration of a drone’s signals being jammed.

“That absorption and isolation enable us to do things in a very quiet environment, so the world does not affect the experiment,” said David Luzzi, vice president for Northeastern’s Innovation Campus and vice provost for research innovation and development. “But also we can do things inside that will not affect the world.”

The indoor facility is connected to a netted enclosure outdoors, measuring 150 feet by 200 feet, which is large enough for GPS testing. Drones can be navigated in and out between the two areas for seamless excercises in all conditions.

It was a scene from science-fiction brought to life. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University

“When you have companies like [the Russian arms producer] Kalashnikov starting to advertise drones systems which carry explosives for the world market, we now are faced with the prospect of drones that can fly 40 miles and suicide-attack with explosives,” Luzzi said. “Obviously, counter-UAS is extremely important.”

The new facility, which is the first of its kind in the United States, is housed in a renovated building that once bore little resemblance to what it has become.

“Believe it or not, this was a traditional high school-like auditorium, with a stage and seating for a few hundred people,” Luzzi said. “We saw this as a tremendous canvas on which to paint this capability. The university invested serious dollars in terms of reinforcing the frame of the building, so it could support the structure.

“And then the Office of Naval Research purchased the very sophisticated equipment that is enabling this facility to truly push the frontiers of our understanding of expeditionary cyber, including handling electromagnetics and cyber over a very large frequency range; effects on navigation; effects on global positioning signals, and how those can be corrupted at the expeditionary edge.”

Northeastern’s Innovation Campus in suburban Boston is anchored by the George J. Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security, which fosters collaborative research aimed at helping communities, critical systems, and infrastructure withstand, respond to, and recover from catastrophes. Researchers in the labs and centers at the institute conduct research in areas such as security, nanoscale printing, and structural testing for buildings and bridges. Last year, the Army Research Laboratory located its Northeast regional hub at the Kostas Research Institute.

“The whole purpose of this campus is to build a high-trust environment where government, industry, and universities can come together to work on problems of importance to national Homeland Security and to the future of the nation,” Luzzi said. “Facilities like this tend to be available only behind fences. And it’s very hard to get that broad base of talent, that broad set of companies, through those fences to contribute to national and Homeland Security. So we are very excited to be able to launch this.”

Greg St. Martin contributed to this report.

For media inquiries, please contact Mike Woeste at m.woeste@northeastern.edu or 617-373-5718.

David Luzzi, an academic leader in innovation for more than two decades, has been elected a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors for his work creating and facilitating inventions and improving universities as research partners.

“It’s a great honor to be recognized,” says Luzzi, who is also the senior vice provost for research and helped lead the development of Northeastern’s Innovation Campus.

“It’s also a credit to the founders of the NAI for recognizing that entrepreneurship and innovation coming out of universities provides tremendous value to the nation and world and needs to be celebrated and fostered,” he says of the Tampa-based organization. 

The Innovation Campus in Burlington, Mass., brings together universities, corporations, and government agencies to accelerate the transition of research and development to commercial and military technologies.

It is home to the Army Research Laboratory, U.S. Air Force programs, and the George J. Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security (KRI) — which Luzzi created with Northeastern alumnus Kostas in 2011.

Partners ranging from a two-person startup to corporations with more than $60 billion in annual revenue are present on campus. As the head of the KRI, Luzzi manages its relationship with its  corporate partners, for which KRI provides programs in areas such as cybersecurity and advanced manufacturing.

The campus also boasts the Biopharmaceutical Training and Technology Lab, which spun up a fully-licensed viral-testing lab in just six weeks, the Life Sciences Testing Center, to provide coronavirus testing for Northeastern. The state-of-the-art facility is key to the university’s efforts to ensure the safety of the Boston campus and its surrounding communities. 

Luzzi recognized early in his career the challenges that universities face in transitioning their inventions and discoveries. “There was a growing awareness of the need to improve the way that universities engage with the outside world in terms of transition of technology,” he explains.

One of the biggest patenting hurdles facing universities is the sheer breadth of the subject matter. “Universities cover every subject under the sun,” Luzzi says. Companies, on the other hand, are more focused and can target their investments.

He points to IBM, which typically leads tech companies in the number of patents it files every year. The Armonk, N.Y.-based giant has received more than 150,000 U.S. patents since 1920 for innovations ranging from magnetic storage to laser eye surgery, yet with more focus than a top research university.

But, Luzzi explains, universities struggle to produce strong patent positions. “We typically are only able to patent one or two things around a particular technology,” he says.

Patents are important for a university because they provide the protection needed for companies to accept the risk to further develop and bring new discoveries to market, he explains. Funding for continued development is another hurdle.

Private companies can prioritize projects with potential and provide a steady flow of research and development funding. Universities, however, depend on the government for funding, which can be less predictable because of the government’s focus on new discoveries and early-stage research.

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“It is harder to get government money to fund technology past the initial excitement of the new discovery phase,” says Luzzi, who was a member of the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board and served as its Science and Technology Chair.

That, in turn, gave birth to the realization that universities needed to get better at partnering.

“We have always had a challenging relationship with industry in terms of understanding how to produce a mutually positive return on investment,” Luzzi explains.

Lessons learned eventually paved the way for the creation of the Nanotechology Institute in Philadelphia, the first nanotech institute in the country, which was focused on the convergence of nano- and bio- technologies.

“We had 13 universities and research centers all pooling their nanotech intellectual property (IP) under one roof, and that enabled us to put together pools of IP that could create better value propositions for entrepreneurs,” says Luzzi.

When he later joined Northeastern he brought that successful model to Burlington, where the government, university, and industry work together in what Luzzi describes as a “very strong innovation ecosystem.”

Luzzi plans to use his new platform at NAI to share these successes nationally, and to tell Northeastern’s story.  

“I plan to promote our up-and-coming inventors, entrepreneurs, and innovators at Northeastern aggressively to the NAI,” he says.

“If you’re going to go into upper administration in academia,” Luzzi explains, “the success of your colleagues is what you’re striving for. And that’s something that has always been the way I felt about things here at Northeastern.”

For media inquiries, please contact media@northeastern.edu.

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Twenty years ago last month, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was created in response to the 9/11 attacks.

Stephen E. Flynn, director of Northeastern University’s Global Resilience Institute, was there from day one. A member of the Hart-Rudman Commission, which both informed and foretold the creation of the federal department, Flynn had been thinking about national security and the threats facing the U.S. for decades—well before the infamous terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

News@Northeastern recently sat down to chat with Flynn, who criticized the department in its early years for its narrow focus on terrorism. He says there’s still a lot of work to do. His comments have been edited for brevity and clarity.

You were part of the Hart-Rudman Commission, which outlined a vision for what would become the Department of Homeland Security. Set the scene for us. It’s the late ‘90s. What are security experts concerned about?

One of the main findings of the commission was that the greatest challenge confronting the United States, from a national security perspective, would be a catastrophic terrorist attack on our soil—and that the nation was not prepared to deal with such an attack. That was rolled out on Jan. 1, 2001, to a collective yawn in Washington D.C. 

Then 9/11 comes around and suddenly the report gets dusted off. It was picked up in particular by [former] Sen. Joe Lieberman, who then advocated for one of the recommendations, which was combining the border agencies and [Federal Emergency Management Agency] together into a new department, essentially focusing their efforts. Security was seen as a Republican strong suit. And Lieberman, you may recall, ran as a vice presidential candidate with Al Gore and was seen as a potential rival in the 2004 election. 

So the Bush administration had to get out in front of this challenge. That political dynamic ultimately led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

When the department was up and running, what challenges did it face as a fledgling government body?

It was put together in a hurry and without a lot of enthusiasm. A reaction to the political climate at the time. It was not set up for success. One of the issues, as you just pointed out, was that it was built almost entirely around the terrorism risk when there were a lot of other hazards. There was also the problem that, when the Bush administration stood it up and brought these agencies together, they were worried that creating a new federal department would give the appearance of big government. And Republicans are the party, supposedly, of smaller government. 

To square that circle, they essentially said they would treat it like a big merger. They said they were going to get all these synergies out of bringing these agencies together. So what they ended up doing was set it up without any real staffing. They essentially taxed the agencies that fell into the department to send their senior managers on one- or two-year details; and then made it almost a political dumping ground. 

They created 300 political appointee positions that they rotated people in and out of. By the time we got to 2009, when the Obama administration started, only one quarter of the Department of Homeland Security’s staff had been there for more than two years. I remember frequently visiting the department—there was always a new set of faces, talking about the same challenges. But for them, it was always brand new.

The other big issue was that federal agencies in the department like FEMA, the Coast Guard, and Customs and Border Protection needed upgraded capabilities to do their missions, but the resources were spent more on new technologies rather than in investing in people to include training and education. And thirdly, they had to sort out the “federalism” challenge. Executing homeland security is ultimately done at the state and local levels, right? And that created issues for the Bush Administration which was reluctant to direct state and local governments on what they should be doing. 

The bottom line was that getting DHS off to a strong start was simply not a priority for the White House and Congress in its early years. The focus was on the War on Terror overseas and the FBI which is in the Department of Justice was the lead agency for counterterrorism at home. The Department of Homeland Security was trying to find a way to work with governors, mayors, and critical infrastructure operators—most of who were in the private sector—but it struggled getting them to really step up their efforts. A lot of it was, ‘Hey, you guys should do more. Here is some grant money you can compete for.’ It was never about trying to mobilize the homeland; instead DHS ended up playing basically a minor support role to states and localities, where most of the capacity ultimately needs to be.  

The last problem was an almost complete failure to engage civil society. After 9/11, Americans were largely told that their role was to just keep “shopping and traveling.” “Get back to your daily lives and we’ll take care of you,” the federal government essentially said. And that was something I was most critical about. At the end of the day, our greatest asset for dealing with major shock and disruptions is always civil society, because that’s where the rubber meets the road. When there is a pandemic, as we saw most recently, or any major disaster, it’s all going to come down to local organizations, nonprofits, and faith-based groups, etc. They’re going to have to figure out how to cope with these big disasters and catastrophes. The challenge is how to empower them with the knowledge and resources to play that role.

How is the department doing today?

The department definitely has moved more into an “all hazards” approach. Appropriately, homeland security has been broadened from terrorism, with issue of cybersecurity getting much more attention. Belatedly, coming out of [Hurricane] Katrina in 2005, there was a recognition of how important FEMA is to the mission of homeland security. As FEMA really grew and got its legs in the early aughts (2000-09) and late aughts, that’s really allowed the department to actually be more effective in speaking to all hazards as an element of homeland security versus the terrorism threat. That’s all good in my view. 

On the second issue of the department itself getting its legs, that’s still a mixed bag. The department is really set up around its operating agencies: the Coast Guard … [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] … and FEMA; those are the big players. But the secret service is also in there; there’s a bunch of them that have been thrown. All those agencies have their original congressional overseers. There is an overseer of the Department of Homeland Security, but it doesn’t actually oversee the agencies that are in the Department of Homeland Security. 

Customs and border protection is overseen by congressional treasury committees, because it used to be in the Department of Treasury. So what that means is that these agencies essentially have a way to end-run their own leadership by going directly to Congress to get their budgets supported there. Because that’s where the rubber hits the road. And it’s very difficult for the leadership of the department to herd the cats, so to speak, because at the end of the day, Congress allocates the fund. 

These agencies basically have one eye to their congressional masters, and another eye to the administration. So it’s been a real challenge to essentially manage these agencies in a way that makes them all pull together, which was the initial vision.

There also hasn’t been near the investment in these agencies to improve their training and education. After 9/11, everything was about buying new technology; we wanted to impress people with stuff. But the actual investing in people to actually do the work: not so much.  

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