Northeastern University

Northeastern University is a private research university headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, founded in 1898 by the Boston Young Men's Christian Association. It has grown into one of the largest universities in the United States by enrollment, with over 48,800 students as of fall 2024, spread across its Boston campus and satellite locations in cities including Seattle, San Jose, Charlotte, New York City, London, and Toronto. The university's AI safety-relevant work is concentrated in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and the Institute for Experiential AI (EAI). The EAI was launched in October 2019 with a $50 million university investment and now involves 90+ faculty members. It emphasizes responsible AI, human-in-the-loop systems, and applied AI for healthcare, climate, and security. In November 2025, Northeastern joined CRAIG (the Center for Responsible Artificial Intelligence and Governance), a first-of-its-kind National Science Foundation-funded research effort that unites Northeastern, Ohio State, Baylor, Rutgers, and industry partners such as Meta and Nationwide to tackle AI ethics and governance challenges. On technical AI safety, Professor David Bau at Khoury College leads a mechanistic interpretability research lab. His work focuses on discovering and editing causal mechanisms within large language models, including circuit discovery and concept erasure from neural networks. Open Philanthropy funded a postdoctoral position in his lab (Sam Marks) for mechanistic interpretability research. Bau also leads the National Deep Inference Fabric (NDIF), a $9 million NSF project democratizing access to foundation model internals. In October 2025, ECE/Khoury Assistant Professor Weiyan Shi received two Open Philanthropy grants totaling $1.02 million: one through the Technical AI Safety RFP to research mitigating emergent misalignment in advanced AI systems, and one through the Improving Capability Evaluations RFP to evaluate AI agent safety in high-stakes decision-making scenarios. Northeastern holds Carnegie R1 (very high research activity) designation, received $296.3 million in external research awards in FY2024, and has an operating budget of $2.22 billion and an endowment of $1.85 billion as of FY2024.