A Journey of Interdisciplinary Research Experiences
Matthew Coughlin, E’25, mechanical engineering, gained extensive research experience in thermofluids in a lab at Northeastern, with three summer Research Experiences for Undergraduates, and on co-op. He was nominated for the prestigious Knight-Hennessy Scholarship and received the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program Award.
Math, design, and physics were what drew Matthew Coughlin, E’25, to pursue a degree and career in mechanical engineering. “Where you see those nicely unified, especially in an applied context, is mechanical engineering,” he says.
Engineering is a discipline of problem-solving with a particular approach and application. The first step is to decompose the problem into sub-challenges and then solve each of them through experimentation or analysis. The results are synthesized into a final product; sometimes this is a physical device and sometimes it’s an applicable process. The systematic and linear mindset of mechanical engineering research is a “fun way to solve and design solutions to challenges whether they’re in industry, government, national labs, or academics,” Coughlin says.
Coughlin credits Northeastern’s robust engineering courses and accomplished faculty to how easily he was able to transfer the foundation he gained from the classroom to solve real-world challenges during his first co-op at Blue Origin—a space technology company. But after completing this co-op, he was ready to transition to academic research.
By participating in academic research, students can use what they learned in class and on co-op to tackle challenges that have not been explored before. He says, “We [as students] can learn firsthand how to build results from nothing.”
Coughlin’s interest in academic research spurred a Northeastern co-op and three Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) positions during the summers of 2022, 2023 and 2024. With the REUs at other universities, Coughlin says, “I learned the many ways researchers at other universities conduct their research and tackle problems.” His REU at the University of Delaware introduced him to the material science side of mechanical engineering. The lab studied localized magnetic fields inside thin materials for quantum computing applications. His role was to write a code to automate localized magnetic field measurements using sensors made from diamonds with nitrogen vacancies. Coughlin enjoyed the work, but he realized he wanted to focus more on fluid mechanics and thermal transport.
His second and third REUs were at the Nanoheat Lab at Stanford University, where he was able to explore his interest in thermofluids research. He studied the thermal properties of liquid metals, with a focus on their thermal conductivity, and explored new highly conductive thermal interface materials made from liquid metals for use in high-performance computing.
Coughlin’s second co-op was at Northeastern in the Multiphase Transport Research Lab, funded by an AJC Merit Research Scholarship from the Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships. He researched the physics of the Saffman-Taylor interface instability, known as viscous fingering, in non-Newtonian fluids. Essentially, he measured how a liquid with high viscosity (non-Newtonian fluid) behaves when displaced by a liquid with low viscosity—think moving honey with water.
He was a part of the entire research process, from identifying the central research question to preparing the findings for publication. “These research experiences offered me a unique opportunity to engage with experimental design and pursue interesting interdisciplinary research questions,” he says. To continue this research, Coughlin pursued the Project-Based Exploration for the Advancement of Knowledge (PEAK) Summit Award from Northeastern.
In recognition of these experiences, Coughlin was nominated for the prestigious Knight-Hennessy Scholarship, which funds three years of graduate school at Stanford University. He also received the highly competitive National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
“We are in a time when there is an enormous amount of interdisciplinary collaboration and problem solving between academia, industry and government. The next discoveries are not going to happen inside disciplines. They’re going to be a result of interdisciplinary collaborations. And that’s something I very much want to be a part of,” he says.