Mahdi Hosseini Receives DARPA Young Faculty Award
Hosseini’s lab aims to develop a novel sensing paradigm based on 'coherent' levitation
Northwestern Engineering’s Mahdi Hosseini has received the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award (YFA).
Hosseini is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering and director of the Innovation in Quantum Pedagogy, Application and its Relation to Culture (IQ-PARC) project, funded by the US Department of Defense (DoD) National Defense Education Program. He has received a two-year DARPA YFA award totaling $500,000.
Hosseini’s Quantum Atom Optics research group investigates the intricate dynamics of light-atom interactions in various platforms, including rare-earth crystals, room-temperature gases, and nanophotonic structures. The team aims to harness the unique particle properties of light for applications in quantum optics, quantum materials, quantum communication, and quantum sensing.
Through the YFA project, titled “Coherent Levitation of Macroscopic Sensors,” Hosseini seeks to pioneer a fundamentally new technique in controlling and reading information from sensors. His team will develop a novel sensing paradigm utilizing magnetic and optical trapping to create high-Q oscillators. Using an infrared laser beam, trapping provides an ultra-precise and contact-free method to manipulate particles.
“This research stands to benefit engineering communities focused on advancing sensor and navigation technologies,” said Hosseini, who is also a faculty member of the Applied Physics Graduate Program, a joint PhD program between Northwestern Engineering and Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. “This platform will enhance our understanding of diamagnetic and optical trapping in millimeter-scale objects and unlock the potential to develop advanced, highly sensitive macroscopic sensor technologies with applications in magnetometry, vibrational sensing, accelerometry, inertial, and force sensing.”
Building on preliminary results, Hosseini’s team demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed technique through theoretical and experimental tests.
“I am truly honored to be recognized as a DARPA YFA awardee, which allows me to continue pursuing research on a topic I am deeply passionate about,” Hosseini said.
The DARPA YFA program provides high-impact funding, mentoring, and networking connections to elite early-career researchers that enable transformative DoD capabilities in national security through innovative research discovery.