NNCI Collaborative Intelligence Research Awards

Announcing the 2026 NNCI Collaborative Intelligence Research Awardees 

The Northwestern Network for Collaborative Intelligence (NNCI) is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2026 Collaborative Intelligence Research Awards (CIRA).  

Breakthrough research rarely happens within a single discipline. Many of today's most pressing challenges require new ways of combining human expertise, data, and intelligent technologies. The CIRA program was created to support these kinds of collaborations by providing seed funding for innovative, interdisciplinary research that advances the fields of AI and data science while creating new opportunities for discovery, partnership, and impact. This year's awardees exemplify the creativity and collaborative spirit that define Northwestern's research community. 

These projects reflect the breadth of research taking place across Northwestern, spanning environmental science, healthcare, human-centered AI, law, materials science, quantum networking, robotics, and social and political systems. Together, they highlight the many ways researchers are working across disciplines to explore new ideas, build meaningful partnerships, and advance knowledge in areas of critical importance.  

2026 CIRA Awardees 

A Multimodal Agentic AI Framework for Radiation Oncology Treatment Plan Verification 
P. Troy Teo, Ryan Bandoske, Paul Botsford, and Yuri Balasanov 

AI-Enabled Wearable Electrical Impedance Tomography for Prosthetic Control 
Karan Ahuja, Matthew A. Grayson, and Matthew J. Major 

Autonomous Nano-Infrared Characterization with Neural Processes 
William Kent, Roberto Dos Reis, Gajendra Shekhawat, Emma Alexander, Vinayak Dravid 

Belief-Grounded Evaluation of LLM Decision-Making 
Jessica Hullman, Aaron Shaw, and Jason Hartline 

Characterization of Soft Materials with Dynamic Gaussian Splats 
Emma Alexander and Junsoo Kim 

Collaborative Intelligence for Adult Guardianship Research: AI-Agent Workflows for Scalable Data Infrastructure 
Bernard S. Black, Katherine Litvak, Lori Ann Post, Christina Maimone, and Emilio Lehoucq 

Countering the Spiral of Silence with an LLM-Calibrated ‘Rebalanced Visibility’ Feed-Ranking Algorithm 
William Brady and Ágnes Horvát 

Foundation Models for Polarization Stabilization in Deployed Quantum Networks 
Prem Kumar, Rajkumar Kettimuthu, and Raman Khurana 

Physics-Constrained Machine Learning for Inverse Identification of Corneal Biomechanics 
Bahador Bahmani, Oluwaseyi Balogun, and Angelo P. Tanna 

Predicting Heavy Metal Contamination Across Multiple Plant Species Toward Improved Mitigation Strategies 
Alicia Foxx, Shelby Hatch, Arend Kuyper, and Nicholas Medina 

Congratulations to this year's awardees. We look forward to following their progress and sharing the discoveries, partnerships, and innovations that emerge from their work.