Lab Director

Professor Ken Duffy

Ken R. Duffy is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Professor of Mathematics at Northeastern University where he is associated to the Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things. He earned his B.A. in mathematics and Ph.D. in applied probability from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

From November 2023 to July 2024, he was Interim Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University. From 2017 and 2022 he was the Director of the Hamilton Institute, the National University of Ireland Maynooth’s interdisciplinary applied mathematics research institute. With Prof. James Gleeson (University of Limerick) and Prof. Claire Gormley (University College Dublin), from 2019 to 2022 he was a co-Director of the Science Foundation Ireland Centre for Research Training in Foundations of Data Science, which funds over 120 Ph.D. students.

His primary research focus is on the interdisciplinary application of probability and statistics in science and engineering, which led him to co-found the Royal Statistical Society’s Applied Probability Section in 2011.

In communications and information theory, his work in collaboration with others has won the best paper award at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (2015), the best paper award from IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering (2019) for all papers published during 2016-2018, the best research demo at COMSNETS (2022), the best demo at COMSNETS (2023), and the best paper award from IEEE MILCOM (2024). With Prof. Muriel Médard from MIT, he is a co-inventor of Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding, as realized in silicon in collaboration with Prof. Rabia Yazicigil at Boston University.

In immunology and haematopoiesis, he has long running collaborations with Prof. Philip Hodgkin at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Prof. Cristina Lo Celso at Imperial College London, and Dr Leila Perie at Institut Curie. Their work has been published in journals including Science, Cell, Nature Communications, Nature Cell Biology, Nature Immunology, and Cell Stem Cell.

In the interpretation of DNA forensics data, he has a long running collaboration with Prof. Catherine Grgicak and Prof. Desmond Lun at Rutgers University, Camden. Their work on PROVEDIt received praise from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology of the then US president Barak Obama. They are currently developing single cell pipelines for DNA forensics to resolve the complex mixture problem.  

See google scholar for an up-to-date list of papers.