In the post-9/11 era, a Northeastern imaging research center takes on a new mission.
Adrianne Appel
It’s not every day that a fledgling university laboratory gets a call from the office of the U.S. Vice President, urging scientists to please hurry up with that invention.
But interactions like this with high levels of U.S. government are becoming more common at Northeastern University’s Gordon Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems (CSSIS). The center decided two years ago to shift its focus away from academic research towards the development and commercialization of technology for government and industry clients. It received a $20 million grant last year from the Gordon Foundation to fulfill its new mission.
CSSIS works on devices that can detect hidden objects, whether a tumor in the body, a mine underground, or a bomb in a suitcase, using a range of technologies, from optics and X-rays to sonar and radar. Its biggest clients are the U.S. defense and homeland security departments, which have poured millions of dollars nationwide into the development of counter-terrorism technologies like bomb detectors since 9/11.
In response to this influx of government funding, the Northeastern center has gone from developing technologies for a wide range of fields, like medicine and deep-sea exploration, to focusing mainly on building devices for military and security applications.
By 2010, “CSSIS probably won’t be interested in basic research. There’ll be less funding for individual projects,” says Carey Rappaport, CSSIS’s associate director.
Switching gears
The CSSIS began in 2000 as an academic consortium led by Northeastern and funded by the National Science Foundation to show how universities could partner with business and government to conduct basic research and bring it out of the lab and into the marketplace. It developed prototype devices that could be adapted for different uses.
One example is a breast cancer imaging system now being tested at Massachusetts General Hospital. It identifies tumors based on differences in electrical conductivity in tumors and normal tissue.
Knowing that the NSF funding would run out by 2010, Michael Silevitch, the center’s director, and his colleagues decided two years ago that doing more product development and commercialization and less basic research would lead to a more sustainable future.
Using its Gordon grant, the center has hired three engineers and businesspeople experienced in developing products for clients. It will also begin training a select group of 10 engineers from industry this fall on how to quickly turn ideas into patentable products.
Sniffing bombs
As part of its shift in focus, CSSIS decided to pursue lucrative government contracts. For example, in 2004 the center won a $4.5 million homeland security contract to develop, in partnership with a small Canadian company, a prototype device that detects radioactive explosives, or “dirty bombs,” in trucks.
Within a week, the center got a call from the White House; the U.S. Vice President wanted three units in nine months, a much faster delivery date than expected.
Raytheon, the Waltham, MA-based defense contractor, is now manufacturing the $500,000 detectors, which are U-shaped and big enough for a truck to drive through. They will be erected at major U.S. ports and border crossings.
The center has begun working on a $1.7 million homeland security contract to devise a dirty-bomb detector for suitcases.
David Kaeli, a leader of one of CSSIS’s research programs and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern, says he’s happy with the new direction CSSIS has taken.
“I think everyone appreciates when [their] work can turn into something that’s useful,” he says. “I have the utmost respect for what we’ve been able to create and what we will accomplish in the future.”