Research Quick Takes

Professor Vikrant Vaze is co-author of "Integrated Schedule Planning for Regional Airlines Using Column Generation" published in Transportation Science. "Where, how often, when, and with what aircraft an airline operates its flights decides passenger demand and costs. Ours is the first study to jointly optimize all these decisions by developing a new algorithm resulting in significant profit improvements and better ability to serve small and rural communities with connections to larger hub airports," said Vaze.

PhD Innovation Program Fellow Peter Bertone, co-founder and CEO of GyroGel, presented his company's patient-specific facial bone graft substitute at the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute (ARMI) Investment Summit, and received their 2026 Breakthrough Technology Award. "As part of the award, GyroGel will be automatically enrolled in BioFab Startup Lab Cohort 5 and receive commercialization support to help advance the technology toward scalable manufacturing." wrote ARMI.

PhD student Yuanhao Chen '25 received the Best Paper Award at the Association for Computing Machinery's International Conference on Multimodal Interaction in Napoli, Italy. The paper, co-authored with Professor Peter Chin, is titled, "MoDAl: Self-Supervised Neural Modality Discovery via Decorrelation for Speech Neuroprosthesis." Said Chen, "Professor Chin and I developed a multimodal LLM-based system that converts the brain activity of a speech-impaired person with bulbar-onset ALS, recorded by implanted electrodes as they try to speak, directly into text. While earlier systems discarded signals from Broca’s area due to degraded performance, our system learns to extract complementary information from Broca's area, and it makes about 18% fewer word errors than the best previous system that decodes end-to-end, in a single step."

Professor Vikrant Vaze is co-author of "Multimodal Transportation Pricing Alliance Design: Large-Scale Optimization for Rapid Gains" selected by the Transportation Science editorial board to receive one of the journal's Paper of the Year Awards for 2025. "We show that innovative pricing optimization algorithms and mechanism design can incentivize collaboration between public transit agencies and private on-demand operators to simultaneously benefit passengers, increase provider profits, reduce emissions and improve equity—a rare win-win-win-win opportunity," said Vaze.

Professor Hélène Seroussi is a co-author of "Sea-level contribution from Thwaites Glacier doubles in an observation-constrained ice-sheet model" published in Nature Communications. "Until now, models have treated the grounding zone, where a glacier detaches from the underlying bedrock and begins to float, as a discrete line, because observations in such regions were scarce. Adding seawater intrusions and melting in this zone to simulations of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica allows the model to better reproduce three decades of observed retreat, and roughly doubles its projected contribution to sea-level rise by 2100," said Seroussi.

Professor Geoffrey Parker joined Eversource and US Department of Energy (DOE) Assistant Secretary Katie Jereza in Manchester, NH to officially mark the selection of Thayer and Eversource for a DOE award of $47M to expand electric grid capacity. "Junbo [Zhao] has worked with Eversource for years, and that relationship is the foundation this project is built on," Parker said. "That is exactly the role we want to play: helping our faculty turn deep expertise and long-standing partnerships into large-scale work with real impact."

Professor Vikrant Vaze was invited to speak at the GE Vernova AI EDGE Symposium in New York. His talk, titled "Multi-Objective Stochastic Optimization of Hybrid Renewable Energy Systems in Fragile States," was based on his work done with PhD students Lilly Yang and Siqi Ke and MS student Ryan Proulx '25 as co-authors. "The biggest takeaways from the symposium were about the future of work itself, about the industry-wide opportunities and challenges associated with the rapidly evolving business practices to accommodate AI-human teams—learning what to delegate to AI and what must be human-controlled," said Vaze.

PhD candidate Yineng "Phoebe" Sun Th'17 Th'26 is first author, with Lecturer Armin Fügenschuh and Professor Vikrant Vaze as co-authors, of "Physics-aware truck and drone delivery planning using optimization & machine learning" published in Computers & Operations Research. The presented framework has been shown to reduce delivery time and energy use compared with simplified planning approaches. "This work matters because it brings realistic physical modeling into operations research, showing how optimization and data-driven methods can work together to make complex delivery systems both more efficient and more practical," said Sun.

Industry PhD student Sie Hendrata Dharmawan presented four papers from Professor Peter Chin's LISP Lab at the 35th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks in Padua, Italy. "I am grateful to Professor Chin, the LISP Lab, and my collaborators for making this possible, and to Muhammad Farrukh and colleagues for trusting me to present their work on topological anomaly detection. What ties these papers together is a question I care about deeply: how do we capture the structure hidden in complex data? Whether it's adding loop structure to graph neural networks, measuring a node's sphere of influence with game theory, or detecting communities across multiple networks, the conference gave us great feedback and follow-up work, and I'm looking forward to diving into it," said Dharmawan.

This past summer, PhD student Paulina Umansky, who works with Professor Ian Baker on Antarctic ice microstructure and Professor Jacob Buffo on life detection in planetary ices, lived on the Taku Glacier in Alaska for three weeks as a participant in the Juneau Icefield Research Program. "The Juneau Icefield serves as an analog for environments across the solar system such as Mars and Europa. I conducted a pilot study on 'Life Detection Across Taku Glacier,' collecting subglacial and supraglacial samples. In the field, I learned several assays and applied them to analyze these samples, quantifying biosignatures present across the icefield," says Umansky.

Professor Colin Meyer received an Early Career Program (ECP) Award from the DEVCOM Army Research Lab. ECP awards support creative basic research in science and engineering; enhance early career development of outstanding young investigators; and increase opportunities for young investigators to pursue research in areas relevant to the US Army. "As climate change drives sea‑level rise and amplifies hazards in mountain regions, I’m excited to launch a multidisciplinary effort that links the physics of frozen soils with societal needs. Our work will focus on frost heave, permafrost‑related hazards, and the dynamics of subglacial environments. By integrating laboratory experiments, mathematical models, and thermosyphons technology, we aim to develop actionable solutions for infrastructure resilience through adaptation," says Meyer.

PhD student Spencer Bertsch Th'19 and Professor Vikrant Vaze are co-authors of "FIND Lp(a) Machine Learning Model: Targeted Screening Enrichment of Elevated Lipoprotein(a) in Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease" published in JACC: Advances. The study used data from deidentified medical records to "Flag, Identify, Network, and Deliver (FIND)" adults with likely elevated Lipoprotein(a). "By combining state-of-the-art machine learning with relevant clinical information from electronic health records, we demonstrated that the effectiveness of Lipoprotein(a) screening can be more than doubled," said Bertsch.