News and Events

October 21, 2026

NanoSI researchers Gabriel Giribaldi, Luca Colombo and Matteo Rinaldi contributed to a new Advanced Materials study showing how nanoscale scandium clustering enhances the electrical properties of scandium aluminum nitride. Films grown by molecular beam epitaxy showed roughly twice the dielectric permittivity of sputtered films, pointing to a new strategy for engineering ScAlN for MEMS resonators, sensors and RF components. The work was conducted with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Nova Research Inc. and Michigan State University.

October 14, 2026

A Northeastern team has received the Best Student Paper Award at the 2026 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium for work on a fiber-coupled acousto-optic ultrasound probe. Developed by Yvonne Sautriot, Ahmed Sami Zikrallah and Alp A. Derin, the device pairs a piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducer with an optical microresonator, advancing miniaturized probes for in vivo photoacoustic imaging. The work is supported by ARPA-H.

October 7, 2026

NanoSI researchers led by PhD student Samuel Quaresima and Professor Cristian Cassella have demonstrated a chip-scale antenna that uses a monolithically integrated piezoelectric transformer to boost two electrically small slot antennas. Published in JMEMS, the rice-grain-sized device achieved record realized gain for RF MEMS antennas using a single-mask, foundry-compatible process.

October 6, 2026

NanoSI faculty member Benyamin Davaji presented on metrology-enabled digital twins for autonomous nanomanufacturing at the 2026 NANOscientific Symposium Americas, held September 29–30 across Northeastern's Boston and Burlington campuses. Day two offered hands-on training with atomic force microscopes, an imaging spectroscopic ellipsometer and a digital holographic microscope.

October 5, 2026

Three NanoSI assistant professors received prestigious early-career honors in 2025–2026. Benyamin Davaji earned the 2026 Hilton Head Rising Star of Microsystems Award, Soner Sonmezoglu an NIH Trailblazer Award for an electro-optic sensor for MRI-guided interventions, and Sunil Mittal an NSF CAREER Award for on-chip optical frequency combs.

September 29, 2026

NanoSI researchers developed palladium-coated aluminum nitride resonators that rank among the most sensitive resonant hydrogen sensors reported, publishing in the IEEE Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems. Residual stress alone shifted sensitivity up to 2.6 times, and the optimal 317 MHz device reached 772 Hz/ppm, offering a roadmap for compact leak detectors.

September 24, 2026

NanoSI faculty member Aravind Nagulu joins RAPTORS, a six-year, $9M U.S. Army-funded project led by Duke University with Yale and Raytheon. His lab will develop radio-frequency integrated circuits that process signals in the analog domain, close to where they are received, enabling smaller, faster and more energy-efficient electromagnetic sensing systems.

September 22, 2026

NanoSI researchers led by Cristian Cassella, Xufeng Zhang and Mingzhong Wu published work in the IEEE Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems on chip-scale magnetoelectric antennas. Their two Aluminum Scandium Nitride devices set bandwidth records for the device class, and modeling showed magnetoelastic coupling drives the radiation, guiding miniaturized sensor design.