PhD Network

Sara Wadia-Fascetti

Vice Provost for the PhD Network

Professor Wadia-Fascetti served as Associate Dean for Graduate Education in the College of Engineering between 2010 and 2017. As Associate Dean, she collaborated with the college Graduate Directors and colleagues across the University to strengthen engineering graduate programs, craft new degree & certificate pathways, and create student and faculty focused graduate support. As the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Education (2010 – 2015), her leadership contributed to the tremendous growth of COE. During this period research grew 40% and engineering PIs on individual proposals increased by 30%.

As a professor in the Civil & Environmental Engineering Department, she has led and co-led cross-college interdisciplinary initiatives resulting in advanced technologies and systems to inspect and maintain our transportation networks; doctoral training grants; and education program development. As a leader, Professor Wadia-Fascetti envisions and builds institutional initiatives that are sustained beyond her direct role. One example is Northeastern ADVANCE; initially funded by the National Science Foundation and now institutionalized as the ADVANCE Office for Faculty Development at Northeastern University.

Professor Wadia-Fascetti received a BS in Civil Engineering with a double major in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University, and a MS & PhD in Civil Engineering from Stanford University. She is a member of the Carnegie Mellon University Engineering & Public Policy Alumni Advisory Council and the Rochester Institute of Technology ADVANCE Institutional Transformation External Advisory Board. In 2003 she was recognized at the White House with a Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring.

Amanda Cornwall, PhD

Assistant Director, Graduate Education Operations, PhD Network

Amanda Cornwall oversees PhD Network programming, bringing together resources and expertise from around campus and beyond to fill the PhD Network calendar with a collection of events and program streams ranging from professional development to wellness, and more.  She also leads professional development programming for Northeastern’s STARS Fellows and helps to support the LEADERs program.  In her work with Northeastern PhDs, Amanda draws from her experience as a career advisor for master’s and PhD students at Northeastern and at UCLA. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Oregon and a master’s in writing and publishing from Emerson College.

Margaret Wald

Assistant Director, Graduate Education Operations, PhD Network

Margaret Wald collaborates with administrators and offices across Northeastern's colleges and campuses to coordinate and implement university-wide initiatives from travel grants and graduate student awards to fellowship processing and recruitment efforts.  Her experiences in professional baking, running a horse farm, building a garden center, developing software for higher education, teaching at several colleges and universities, and studying in four countries gives her a broad context for translating between theory and practice, managing resources, and creative programming.  Margaret has a PhD in English from Rutgers University.

Jason Sidman, PhD

Director of Partnership Relations

As Director of Partnership Relations, Jason engages with companies to understand their professional development, workforce and business needs and to identify the Experiential PhD programs that meet these requirements.  His responsibilities include providing information about the program of interest, connecting industry partners with Northeastern faculty, establishing agreements between the parties, identifying additional opportunities for joint collaboration, and continuously finding ways to improve Northeastern's offerings.

Jason received his PhD from Tufts University in Experimental Psychology.  He then went on to work in industry for 15 years, working in companies that conducted innovative research through joint collaborations between industry and academia.  With his background, Jason has an appreciation both for the experience of students going through a PhD program, and for companies looking to hire, manage, and train PhD-level employees.  It is this perspective that Jason brings to this role as he looks to nurture and expand partnerships between Northeastern and our partners.

Thomas Vicino

Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, College of Social Sciences & Humanities; Professor of Political Science, Public Policy & Urban Affairs

Professor Thomas J. Vicino is the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. He is appointed as Professor in the Department of Political Science and holds a joint appointment in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs. Previously, from 2017-2019, he served as Chair of the Department of Political Science; and from 2011-2017, he served as the Director of the Master of Public Administration Program. In 2014, Prof. Vicino was a U.S. Fulbright Core Scholar to Brazil, where he was a visiting professor of political economy in the Graduate Program in Social Sciences at Pontificia Universidade Catolica (PUC Minas) in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He teaches at the graduate level in the MPA, MPP, and MUPP Programs. At the undergraduate level, he teaches in the political science major and the urban studies minor.

Professor Vicino specializes in the political economy of cities and suburbs, focusing on issues of metropolitan development, housing, and demographic analysis. He is the author of four books, including: Suburban Crossroads: The Fight for Local Control of Immigration Policy (2013) and Transforming Race and Class in Suburbia: Decline in Metropolitan Baltimore (2008) and co-author of Global Migration: The Basics (2014) as well as the bestselling book Cities and Suburbs: New Metropolitan Realities in the US (2010). He has also published numerous book chapters and research articles in peer-reviewed journals. Currently, he serves on the Governing Board of the Urban Affairs Association, holding the elected position of Vice Chair.

Frank Tip

Associate Dean for Graduate Programs, Professor; Khoury College of Computer Sciences

Frank Tip is a Professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. He received a PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 1995. Frank’s extensive list of research areas include: software engineering, programming languages, program analysis, refactoring, test generation, fault localization, automated program repair, data-centric synchronization, and analysis of web applications.

Prior to joining Northeastern, Frank served as Senior Principal Engineer at Samsung Research America in Mountain View, California from 2014 to 2016. Frank also served as a Professor and Cheriton Research Chair in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo from 2012 to 2014, and was a Research Staff Member and Manager at the Software Technology Department at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center from 1995 to 2012.

Mark Patterson

Professor, Marine and Environmental Sciences; Jointly Appointed, Civil and Environmental Engineering; Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Affairs, College of Science; Chief Technology Officer, Global Resilience Institute

Dr. Patterson directs the Field Robotics Laboratory at the Marine Science Center in Nahant, developing Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (free-swimming robots) and methods to use them for environmental monitoring and homeland security applications. Dr. Patterson co-founded the first company to market AUV technology and this former commercial design is now owned and developed by Northeastern University.

For his work with AUV technology, Dr. Patterson received the Lockheed Martin Award for Excellence in Ocean Science and Engineering. He currently collaborates in the areas of counter-terrorism for port and harbor security, developing methods for coordinating swarms of AUVs, and machine learning and signal processing to automatically recognize objects or conditions of interest underwater.

Dr. Patterson received his A.B., A.M., and Ph.D. degrees in Biology from Harvard University, where he combined biomechanics, environmental fluid mechanics, and sensor development to investigate the chemical engineering of mass transfer in marine organisms. He continues to work in the area of environmental fluid mechanics and global change biology on coral reefs. For this research, he has spent 87 days living and working on the bottom of the ocean in underwater laboratories.

Waleed Meleis

Interim Associate Dean for Graduate Education; Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering; Affiliated Faculty, Bioengineering

Professor Waleed Meleis received his BSE degree in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 1990, and the MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1992 and 1996. In 1996 he joined the Computer Engineering Group of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University.

Professor Meleis’s research is on developing and evaluating algorithms and bounds for combinatorially difficult optimization problems.

Jennifer Kirwin

Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Clinical Professor, School of Pharmacy

Professor Jennifer Kirwin joined Northeastern's faculty in 2007 as an Associate Clinical Professor and became the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs after serving as Director of Undergraduate and Professional Programs.  She holds a doctoral degree from the School of Pharmacy at Northeastern.  Professor Kirwin is a Board Certified Pharmacotherapy Specialist and specializes in ambulatory pharmacy practice.  Her current research is in medication adherence.

Thomas Sheahan

Senior Vice Provost for Curriculum and Programs

Prof. Sheahan is a professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Northeastern, where he has been on the faculty since 1991. He is also the Senior Vice Provost for Curriculum and Programs for Northeastern University, overseeing academic program development, governance and inter-college coordination, program assessment integration, and university-wide curricular initiatives, in addition to academic units including ROTC and Explorers.  His technical expertise is in geotechnical engineering, specifically experimental methods for studying the mechanical behavior of soft ground and its relationship to environmental contaminant problems. Most recently, he has been funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) program, first on a basic (R01) grant, then as Training Core Leader for a project known as PROTECT, a multi-institution effort examining the link between groundwater contamination and high preterm birth rates in Puerto Rico. He has also received funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), including a current project related to coastal sustainability adaptation strategies in the U.S. and Caribbean. Prof. Sheahan is the author of over 90 publications, including a seminal textbook on geotechnical engineering. He has been recognized with outstanding teaching awards at Northeastern, and received the national Tau Beta Pi McDonald Mentoring award for his work as a faculty advisor, mentor to junior faculty, and his advising of student groups. His service activities have included national leadership positions in his discipline and as an ABET accreditation evaluator and commission member.