SENTRY Student Spotlight: Mahshid Asri
An international student from Iran, Mahshid Asri is passionate about electrical engineering. She recently graduated with a Ph.D. from Northeastern University, where she worked as a student researcher affiliated with two Department of Homeland Security Centers of Excellence, ALERT (Awareness and Localization of Explosives-Related Threats) and SENTRY. Her research focused on radar imaging and anomaly detection.
Mahshid began her academic journey with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Iran University of Science and Technology. Her undergraduate thesis focused on developing Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access techniques on a Digital Signal Processing board. She continued her education at Northeastern University, enrolling in the Master’s program before transitioning to the Electrical Engineering PhD program. She completed her PhD in April 2024, with her dissertation entitled “Development of Anomaly Detection and Characterization Algorithms Using Wideband Radar Image Processing for Security Applications.”
Mahshid began working with ALERT in 2018 as a research assistant for the center’s current director, Carey Rappaport. She contributed to ALERT’s Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) directed research by developing an automatic algorithm to detect anomalies of airport passengers using mm-wave radar images, a task that formed a significant part of her MS and PhD research. She was responsible for writing physics-based code and testing algorithm performance, particularly focused on identifying the dielectric constant of non-metallic anomalies.
In addition, Mahshid contributed to developing a whole-body scanner prototype for the Computational Models and Algorithms for Millimeter-Wave Whole Body Scanning for Advanced Imaging Technology project. She helped calibrate radar systems, wrote algorithms to remove image clutter, and tested these algorithms using radar images of a manikin. Her contributions were instrumental in advancing the development of this radar prototype.
Currently, Mahshid is engaged as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in SENTRY’s Advanced Sensing Technologies research area, contributing to the Stationary and Aerial Based Radio Frequency/Radar Detection of Drones and Concealed Threats project which is focused on developing methods to monitor pedestrians for large metallic guns and knives. She has collected extensive data using computational electromagnetic simulations and applied deep learning models for image segmentation, detection, and localization of anomalies on radar images.
Looking ahead, she intends to build on her experience with SENTRY and ALERT, seeking industry positions that align with her skills and passion for meaningful engineering work.
Beyond her technical achievements, Mahshid enjoys nurturing her collection of plants, hiking, and participating in a non-fiction book club. She is also a talented musician, playing the Santour, a classical Iranian instrument.