Sternberg Family Distinguished University Professor Alessandro Vespignani of the department of physics discusses the recent controversial research with avian flu virus, H5N1. Photo by Christopher Huang

Last year, in an effort to understand the biology of H5N1, two independent research groups successfully engineered the lethal avian flu virus to be transmissible between mammals, and perhaps among humans. At the end of January, the research community, including the authors of the two studies, agreed to a 60-day moratorium on sensitive H5N1 experiments. In the meantime, the World Health Organization will hold international discussions regarding the future of such research and its availability in the community. We talked to network scientist Alessandro Vespignani, the Sternberg Family Distinguished University Professor of Physics, to discuss the motivations for and implications of research in this area.

What is the H5N1 virus, where did it come from, and why is it being investigated?

Influenza viruses are found in the wild among animal populations like swine, birds or horses. Occasionally they jump between species, and a virus well adapted to spread in the animal population becomes well adapted to spread in the human population.

The highly pathogenic H5N1 is currently only able to spread quickly within the avian populations, periodically infecting humans in vulnerable conditions — for example someone who has a compromised immune system or is overexposed to the virus because he lives in close proximity to poultry farms. H5N1 has not yet acquired human-to-human transmission capabilities.

When it does infect humans, it is currently very lethal, with a mortality rate close to 50 percent, although that number may be skewed due to mild, unreported cases. To put that into perspective, the disastrous 1918 pandemic resulted from a virus whose lethality was somewhere between 2 and 10 percent.

As soon as H5N1 is able to spread between humans we will have a new pandemic. In some cases, when a virus acquires transmission capabilities its lethality diminishes, but it is still unclear why or how this happens. It is also unclear what makes a virus highly transmissible in the first place.

Several scientific groups are studying the H5N1 virus to address questions such as these. Two groups in particular, based in The Netherlands, Japan and University of Wisconsin, recently published results from experiments in which they engineered the virus to have high transmission capabilities between ferrets. Ferrets are good biological models for humans so it is believed that if the virus is highly transmissible among ferrets, it will also be so in the human population.

What are the safety concerns raised by this research?

Many people oppose the idea that scientists are trying to manipulate in the lab a virus that is very dangerous. These kinds of narratives reaffirm the fictional public idea of the evil scientist in the lab.

But the scientists involved in this work really are driven by truly scientific questions that are for the good of society. They are highly trained experts working in highly safe environments. I’m not scared of the virus spontaneously going out of the lab due to negligence — I’m more concerned about people getting a hold of it because they want to do things like bioterrorism.

People are questioning whether it is even pertinent to do this type of research or not. It all depends on what they were able to achieve. If this research really is a breakthrough and it allows us to better understand viral transmissibility and lethality, it may be great research. Along with close monitoring of real-world viruses, it could allow us to see if a pandemic is approaching.

If those questions are not answered, all we’ve done is engineered a dangerous virus — it’s reminiscent of the dark times of the Cold War when biologists were working to cook up the ultimate biological weapon. You don’t want to be in that position, especially in today’s world.

How is the community responding?

The results of the two research efforts have been submitted for publication in the journals Science and Nature. However the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity has recommended that the details of the studies (the methods sections) should be restricted.

Last week, one of the investigators published a letter in Nature arguing against the recommendation because making the methods available to the community would allow the research community to work on the problem simultaneously, which would be much more efficient and a conduit to new discoveries. Also, simply knowing the results means that sooner or later people will figure out one way or another how to reach the end product, even without the published methods.

So the debate is about whether we can hamper science by restraining publications or restricting certain experiments. But to some extent, this is already happening with other viruses. For instance, small pox has been eradicated for many, many years but there are still two places in the world where it is kept. If you want to work with small pox, you have to submit a very complicated application, because you’re managing one of the most dangerous things in the world.

Assistant professor Matthew Goodwin is developing a new way to diagnose and treat patients with Autism Spectrum Disorders using. Photo by Christopher Huang for Northeastern.

Most people diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders suffer from severe forms of the disability, and find it difficult to perform unfamiliar tasks for undefined periods of time, according to Matthew Goodwin, an assistant professor of health informatics at Northeastern University.

Goodwin — who joined the Northeastern faculty in the fall with joint appointments in the College of Computer and Information Science and the Bouvé College of Health Sciences — has studied autism for more than a decade. He says severely affected patients are “the most prevalent in the population, but they’re the ones we understand the least, and the ones we really need to help the most.”

Recognizing that results from studying higher-functioning individuals with autism may not apply to individuals with more severe cases of the disability, Goodwin came up with a novel idea: “Instead of bringing people into the lab, why don’t we consider taking the lab to people?”

To put this idea into practice, Goodwin draws on two forms of computer science. The first, called “ubiquitous computing,” tracks a person’s natural behavior in his home using embedded sensory devices such as cameras or microphones. The second approach, dubbed “wearable computing,” measures physical activity and physiological reactivity using embedded sensors on shoes, clothing and wristbands.

Goodwin notes the effectiveness of combining each approach: “We can have built environments where we know something about overt human behavior, and then with wearable devices we can say something about the internal state of the individual.”

Goodwin began testing this tactic as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, where he later became a research scientist and forged a collaboration with five top-tier research institutions. The partnership culminated in a five-year National Science Foundation Expeditions in Computing grant to develop novel personal health technologies.

Joining Northeastern, Goodwin says, will help him take this work to the next level through interdisciplinary collaborations with faculty members in both the computer and health sciences to address several of the nation’s current health-care challenges.

“Northeastern is willing to be innovative and interdisciplinary,” he explains. “Here, the focus is on applying research, putting it out into the world, figuring out what works and what doesn’t and bringing successes to the masses. This applied focus could really impact public health.”

President Joseph E. Aoun greets Alessandro Vespignani, who was installed as Northeastern University’s Sternberg Family Distinguished University Professor of Physics on Tuesday.

If we can forecast the path of a hurricane or even the trajectory of a subatomic particle, why shouldn’t we also be able to forecast the spread of an emerging disease? That is the question Alessandro Vespignani, who was installed as Northeastern University’s Sternberg Family Distinguished University Professor of Physics on Tuesday in the Raytheon Amphitheater, began asking 10 years ago.

The answer, he explained, is twofold: our ability to predict disease transmission is limited by both the complexity of human social networks and by the fact that understanding that complexity requires enormous amounts of data and thus extremely sophisticated technology.

Vespignani – who holds joint appointments in the College of Science, the College of Computer and Information Science and the Bouvé College of Health Science and is one of the leading network scientists in Northeastern’s Center for Complex Network Research – said the mobility patterns of individuals around the world determine how quickly and vastly a contagion will spread.

During the Black Plague, for example, which killed half of the European population, people could travel only a few miles a day on average. But nearly 700 years later, with the aid of airplanes, automobiles and an exponentially larger population, people are now traveling many thousands of miles each day.

As a result, today’s social network is much more closely linked, according to Vespignani: A germ picked up in Vietnam could travel to Boston in just a few hours. To understand the macroscopic structure of human systems, Vespignani said, we must look not just at individual behavior, but also at the system as a whole. “With just two molecules of water,” he explained, “we won’t see how water behaves as a liquid or ice. We need millions of molecules to do that.”

In human networks, Vespignani said, the individual is the social atom and groups are considered social molecules. When we examine millions of social molecules, a picture emerges depicting our collective behavior. The image is complex, because human social networks don’t respond as we might expect from external forces such as disease. Computer models, Vespignani noted, can help untangle that complexity.

With information constantly flowing from satellite traceable devices such as mobile phones and flight trackers, Vespignani said, we are in the midst of a “data deluge.” For the first time, our computer infrastructure is powerful enough to analyze that data. Vespignani, for example, can map thousands of individuals’ movements across spaces to generate mobility patterns for the whole system.

Two years ago, his team used their model to project the activity peaks of the H1N1 pandemic for various regions in the Northern Hemisphere. Eventually the researchers were able to validate those projections with actual data and found that their “simulations were spot on.”

Vespignani hopes that with other forms of data, like those generated by Internet and social network use, it will be possible to project “not just the spread of disease, but also ideas, knowledge, or the evolution of languages,” he explained.

Northeastern researchers, Vespignani noted, “are keen to create new results now…to see those systems in completely different ways.” His disease model, he said, is a prototype for potentially limitless applications.

Vespignani was elected to the physics and engineering sciences branch of the Academy of Europe last year for his research on the spread of epidemics.

President Joseph E. Aoun said the world-renowned statistical physicist “epitomizes what we’ve been doing” in terms of interdisciplinary collaborations.

Murray Gibson, dean of the College of Science, introduced Vespignani, saying he caps off Northeastern’s team of network scientists, which is made up of world leaders in the field.

Provost Stephen W. Director, who oversaw the formal installation of the new Sternberg Chair, made one last prediction toward the close of the event, noting that we “will be seeing many more installations of Northeastern faculty chairs, creating their own interconnected network of interdisciplinary work.”

Northeastern computer science senior Tyler Denniston.

Northeastern computer science senior Tyler Denniston is among just 60 students nationwide recognized with a 2012 Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award from the Computing Research Association (CRA). The recipient of an honorable mention, he became the fifth College of Computer and Information Science undergraduate the CRA has commended for exemplary research. The others were overall award winner Andrea Grimes in 2005, finalist Jason Ansel in 2007, and honorable mention recipients Jennifer McDonald in 2002 and Tanya Cashorali in 2008.

Denniston has been a member of Professor Gene Cooperman’s research group for the past three years and further honed his research skills through a co-op with VMware, the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure. He also co-authored a peer-reviewed paper included in the PLOS 2011 Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems, a prestigious computing conference.

Denniston’s research has focused on “checkpointing,” or saving the state of a computer program. He contributed to Cooperman’s large Distributed MultiThreaded CheckPointing (DMTCP) research project and to the development of a universal reversible, or “time-traveling,” debugger known as FReD (Fast Reversible Debugger) that uses a novel form of checkpoint restart.

By the time he was a junior, Denniston had developed the first version of a determinism module integrated into the team’s research software. He also acquired what Cooperman has described as “the same research skills as a first- or second-year PhD student.”

The research team recently completed the FReD project, and their open-source software is ready for release to the public. Denniston says, “As an undergraduate, I’ve been able to make very significant contributions to this research. The determinism model turned out to be a very critical piece of the software. I also wrote the whole user interface for the software.”

Now that his research has earned the CRA’s recognition, Denniston says, “It’s good for everyone. It’s good for the college because it shows we have strong students coming out of Northeastern in terms of research. For me personally, it’s really going to help in getting into graduate school. My target is a PhD program, and this is evidence that I know how to do research.”

Although this is the first time Denniston has gained national attention for his research, his potential was apparent several years ago. As a freshman, he was awarded the Dean’s Undergraduate Research Scholarship, which enabled him to work with Cooperman as a sophomore.

“After that, I continued on my own initiative,” Denniston says. “The scholarship started all of this for me.”

Northeastern University network scientists debunked the food-pairing hypothesis, which is based on the principle that foods sharing flavor compounds taste better together.

North American and Western European cuisines tend to use ingredients that share flavor compounds, while East Asian and Southern European cuisines tend to avoid ingredients that share flavor compounds, according to a study by Northeastern University network scientists.

The findings — which were reported in the December edition of the online journal Scientific Reports — appear to debunk the food-pairing hypothesis, which is based on the principle that foods that share flavor compounds taste better together.

“Some scientists in the molecular gastronomy community think foods with similar compositions taste well together, but we found that it really depends on the region,” said coauthor Albert-László Barabási, a Distinguished Professor of Physicswith joint appointments in biology and the College of Computer and Information Science.

Barabási — who recently received an honorary doctorate from the Technical University of Madrid for his contributions to the fields of science and engineering — is the founding director of Northeastern’s world-renowned Center for Complex Network Research (CCNR).

The team of researchers, including former CCNR postdoctoral research associates James Bagrow, Sebastian Ahnert and Yong-Yeol Ahn, took a network-based approach to explore the impact of flavor compounds on ingredient combinations. They designed and analyzed the bipartite network of links between ingredients and flavor compounds found in more than 56,000 recipes from three online repositories, including epicurious.com, allrecipes.com and menupan.com.

Two ingredients were connected if they shared at least one flavor compound. On average, a pair of ingredients in North American cuisine shared 11.7 flavor compounds. By contrast, a pair of ingredients in East Asian cuisine shared an average of 6.2 flavor compounds.

Compared to a randomized recipe dataset, North American dishes tended to use ingredients with more shared compounds than expected by chance, while East Asia dishes tended to use ingredients with fewer than shared compounds than expected.

The researchers found that a small number of ingredients contributed to the food paring effect in each region. Some 13 ingredients in North American cuisine, including milk, eggs and butter, appeared in roughly 74 percent of all recipes.

“These ingredients played a disproportionate role in the cuisine and contributed to the shared compound effect,” Barabási explained.

What’s his favorite food? “I like Hungarian ethnic food, but I won’t reject a good steak or a good burger,” Barabási quipped.

Eurecom’s researchers (from the left) Jonas Zaddach, Davide Balzarotti, and Marco Balduzzi Photo by Andy Greenberg, Forbes Staff

Renting a server from Amazon Web Services promises all the advantages of the Cloud: ephemeral, convenient computing without the nuisance of owning hardware. In fact, it may be more like renting a house where the last tenant left his junk in the closets and hasn’t changed the locks.

Researchers at France’s Eurecom technology institute, Northeastern University and the security firm SecludIT ran automated scanning tools on more than 5,000 of the virtual machines images published on Amazon’s catalog of virtual machines set up with preset software and configurations and ready to run on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. They looked for security and privacy issues like malware, software vulnerabilities, and leftover data and user accounts from the administrator who set up the server’s software.

The results, which the team plans to present a paper at the Symposium on Applied Computing next March, aren’t pretty: 22% of the machines were still set up to allow a login by whoever set up the virtual machine’s software–either Amazon or one of the many other third party companies like Turnkey and Jumpbox that sell preset machine images running on Amazon’s cloud. Almost all of the machines ran outdated software with critical security vulnerabilities, and 98% contained data that the company or individual who set up the machine for users had intended to delete but could still be extracted from the machine.

“If the guy who set up the machine forgot to erase his credentials or left them there on purpose, everyone who has the credential can log into the server,” says Marco Balduzzi, one of the Eurecom researchers on the team. “You rent this machine for personal use, and someone else has a kind of a backdoor to it already.”

Balduzzi points out that it would be possible to publish a server image in Amazon’s catalog with the intent of infecting the user with malware or exploiting a backdoor to steal information. But in some cases it was the creator of the machine image who was put at risk by leaving private keys on the server or failing to completely erase his or her own data before publishing it for customers to use, Balduzzi says.

The research team notified Amazon about the issues last summer, and the company responded by posting a notice to its customers and partners about the problem. “We have received no reports that these vulnerabilities have been actively exploited,” the company wrote at the time. “The purpose of this document is to remind users that it is extremely important to thoroughly search for and remove any important credentials from an [Amazon Machine Image (AMIs)] before making it publicly available.”

Amazon spokesperson Kay Kinton sent me a statement, noting that “Customers have complete control over what information they include, or not, within the AMIs they choose to make publicly available,” and pointing to a couple Amazon pages on using AMI’s securely.

Balduzzi says that an Amazon representative similarly told him that the company considers the issue to be one between users and the third party companies that offer software on Amazon’s platform. “They told me it’s not their concern, they just provide computing power,” Balduzzi says. “It’s like if you upload naked pictures to Facebook. It’s not a good practice, but it’s not Facebook’s problem.”

The Eurecom team’s research isn’t the first to point out security issues in Amazon’s cloud services. Just earlier this week, a team of German researchers revealed a collection of vulnerabilities in Amazon’s web interface that allowed potential data theft from the company’s cloud platform. Amazon has now patched those flaws.

Here’s the full paper from the Eurecom researchers.

This article was written by Andy Greenberg for Forbes Magazine. The original copy can be foundhere.

A few pointers: A patient interacts with a virtual nurse. Photo by Glenn Kulbako

Researchers at Northeastern University have developed a virtual nurse and exercise coach that are surprisingly likable and effective—even if they’re not quite as affable as the medical hologram on Star Trek. In fact, patients who interacted with a virtual nurse named Elizabeth said they preferred the computer simulation to an actual doctor or nurse because they didn’t feel rushed or talked down to.

A recent clinical trial of the technology found that Elizabeth also appears to have a beneficial effect on care. A month after discharge, people who interacted with the virtual nurse were more likely to know their diagnosis and to make a follow-up appointment with their primary-care doctor. The results of the study are currently under review for publication.

“We try to present something that is not just an information exchange but is a social exchange,” says Timothy Bickmore, associate professor in Northeastern’s College of Computer and Information Science. Bickmore led the research. “It expresses empathy if the patient is having problems, and patients seem to resonate with that.”

Bickmore first became interested in working on “virtual agents” after seeing demonstrations of very early interactive animated characters. “I was amazed at how people were instantly mesmerized by them, and how quickly this effect vanished when the characters did something stupid,” he says. “I was interested in seeing how they could be engineered to maintain the enchantment over long periods of time and be used for practical purposes beyond entertainment.”

He adds that patients with little or no computer experience seem to prefer the virtual person to more standard computer interactions, because it feels more natural.

“Most people get frightened when they hear they are going to get care from a computer, so to hear so clearly that we are not short-changing patients is gratifying,” says Joseph Kvedar, a physician and founder and director of the Center for Connected Health at Partners Healthcare. Kvedar has collaborated with Bickmore in the past.

To develop the computer-controlled avatars, researchers first recorded interactions between patients and nurses. They then tried to emulate the nurses’ nonverbal communication by endowing the virtual character with hand gestures and facial expressions. (The resulting animation is, however, much simpler than today’s sophisticated video games.)

Researchers also add small talk, asking users about local sports teams and the weather, which real nurses and coaches often do to put patients at ease. The verbal interactions are fairly basic; the nurse or trainer has a set repertoire of questions, and users choose from a selection of possible answers. For anything beyond that repertoire, the virtual agent will refer the patient to a human health-care provider.

Article by Emily Singer of the MIT technology review. The original article can be found here

Today, Northeastern is opening its first regional campus in Charlotte, N.C. Photo: Patrick Schneider

Advancing a model of higher education that moves “beyond the traditional boundaries of place,” Northeastern University President Joseph E. Aoun announced today that the university will launch a system of regional campuses in selected American cities. The first regional campus opens its doors today in Charlotte, N.C., and university leaders expect to open a second in Seattle, Wash., next year. The university is also actively evaluating opportunities in other cities throughout the U.S.

“The American system of higher education is going to change dramatically in the 21st century,” said Aoun. “Our existing college campuses are based on a model that we imported from England in the 17th century. This model cannot meet the full demands of contemporary society. We need to develop truly modern campuses—regional platforms for graduate education and collaborations between higher education and industry.”

Today’s launch follows two years of extensive planning and research by Northeastern officials, including a strategic decision not to offer undergraduate education at the regional campuses. Site selection of the new campuses is driven by regional demand for graduate education, and opportunities for research partnerships. In a global, knowledge-based economy, many employers require more professionals with graduate-level education, particularly in science and technology fields.

Graduate degree programs at the regional campuses will be based on a “hybrid delivery” model, which involves the integration of online and classroom learning. Existing Northeastern faculty members will teach courses both at the regional campuses and online. The hybrid learning approach is ideal for working professionals because it combines the traditional benefits of face-to-face instruction with the flexibility of online learning.

A broad range of Northeastern’s degree programs—including those in business, engineering, health sciences and computer science—will be offered in the regions. Degrees will be tailored to the demands of the local economy. In Charlotte, for example, the university will offer a master’s degree in health informatics, which aligns with the growing heath-care sector in the region. In Seattle, a master’s degree in information assurance will align with needs of the area’s many technology companies.

Similar opportunities will emerge in the sphere of research. The university is actively discussing a research collaboration with Duke Energy and Center City Partners, a Charlotte-based civic organization. The collaboration will focus on the impact of sustainability efforts within the local labor market.

Northeastern’s leadership in experiential learning—the integration of classroom study with professional experience—provides a strong foundation for the university’s expansion to new regions. Northeastern has relationships with more than 2,500 employers, including Fortune 500 companies, government agencies and global NGOs.

“These regional campuses are completely consistent with who we are as an institution,” said Aoun.

Although undergraduate education will not be offered at the regional campuses, the sites will still strengthen Northeastern’s undergraduate program, which is built on placing students in co-op positions with employers. The regional campuses will deepen relationships with current co-op employers and help to develop relationships with new employers. The sites will also serve as a local resource for undergraduates on co-op placements in a selected region.

Aoun foreshadowed Northeastern’s move in a May 2011 piece published by The Chronicle of Higher Education. “While educational models and offerings have always been diverse, the identities of institutions have typically been tightly coupled with their traditional campuses,” Aoun wrote. “Now the confluence of new technologies, changing student demands, and the emergence of a global higher-education market are quickly loosening the bonds between campus and brand.”

Founded in 1898, Northeastern is a comprehensive, global research university with more than 20,000 undergraduate and graduate students. It offers more than 90 undergraduate majors and more than 165 graduate programs, ranging from professional master’s degrees to interdisciplinary Ph.D. programs. The university’s research enterprise is aligned with three national imperatives: health, security and sustainability. Northeastern students participate in co-op and other forms of experiential learning in 85 countries on all seven continents.

Network scientists David Lazer and Alessandro Vespignani may decide to explore the relationship between natural disasters and Facebook use. Photo illustration by Christopher Huang.

Northeastern University network scientists David Lazer and Alessandro Vespignani have been awarded $1.1 million as part of a $1.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation to analyze the interdependence between complex networks in natural, social and technological systems.

Understanding how an issue may spread through the nation’s transportation infrastructure, for example, could shed light on mitigation strategies designed to keep people safe.

“Knowledge of these dynamical processes would allow us to anticipate and possibly minimize systemic risk in a variety of contexts that affect our daily life,” said Vespignani, the newly appointed Sternberg Distinguished Professor of Physics, Computer Science and Health Sciences, with appointments in the College of Science, College of Computer and Information Science and the Bouvé College of Health Sciences.

The results of the study, which includes Boston University physics professor Eugene Stanley, may also inform the design of telecommunication devices, such as smart phones and social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter.

“Our hope is that we can inform how to structure our technological systems to better enable our social relationships and make them more robust so we don’t have catastrophic reverberations across networks,” noted Lazer, an associate professor of political science and computer science with joint appointments in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities and the College of Computer and Information Science.

The research team may decide to explore the relationship between natural disasters and Facebook use, traffic and mobile phone use, or telecommunication patterns and employee camaraderie.

For example, a close analysis of traffic patterns and historical transporation data could lead to the design of a mobile phone-operated system that helps drivers navigate through congested roads, Lazer said. As he put it, “The system would inform drivers where the traffic is so they can use road networks more efficiently.”

The study also includes an educational component. The research team plans to design a museum exhibit on network science and collaborate with students in the Boston Public Schools.

“We hope to inspire the next generation of scientists at an early age,” Lazer said.

Matthew Strax-Haber, a senior at Northeastern University. Photo by Christopher Huang.

A Northeastern student who came to Boston dreaming of a career with NASA discovered a new passion when a variety of work experiences with companies in the United States, China and the United Arab Emirates gave him an unexpected appreciation for developing efficient solutions and strategies for business and government.

Matthew Strax-Haber, a senior business and computer science dual major, did achieve his goal of working at NASA, on a research computer-engineering co-op at the agency’s Langley facility in Virginia. Though it was rewarding and challenging, he found that he preferred using his computer know-how and problem-solving skills to find new ways of innovating in businesses and government, a discovery that was reinforced on his subsequent co-op jobs.

For example, he spent this past summer in Dubai working as a consulting intern for McKinsey & Company, one of the world’s top management consulting firms.

“When I got there, the focused environment and great mentorship provided an amazing learning experience,” Strax-Haber said of the highly competitive job overseas.

Against the odds, Strax-Haber was part of the tiny number of interns hired outside a tight circle of the Ivy League and other elite universities, something he credits to his experiences on co-op, help from career counselors at Northeastern and coaching from fraternity brothers in Beta Theta Pi

“What Northeastern provides more than anything is an opportunity to get out in the real world and apply what you learn,” said Strax-Haber.

In addition to his summer in Dubai, Strax-Haber spent time in China on a Dialogue of Civilizationsprogram and later worked in legal compliance and investor relations as an intern for YGSoft.

“China was a totally new experience for me,” Strax-Haber said, saying his time in Asia pushed him to further develop his Chinese language skills, which he was using to translate corporate documents from Chinese to English.

In recognition of his global business work, last month Strax-Haber was named one of Northeastern’s first Presidential Global Entrepreneurs.

Before his experiences abroad, Strax-Haber worked co-op jobs in San Diego, where he was a software engineer for Intuit, and in Boston at IBM, where he got a first-hand look at how a major multinational corporation works to best serve its customers’ needs.

His experiential-learning opportunities “really taught me that I wanted to do something in government or business where I could really help people,” Strax-Haber said.