Mechanical Engineering Student Named Knight-Hennessy Scholar
Matthew Coughlin, E’25, mechanical engineering, has been named a Knight-Hennessy Scholar at Stanford University, becoming the fifth Husky to receive the prestigious fully-funded graduate scholarship. He is passionate about solving the thermal management challenges inhibiting the continued densification of electronics.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Alena Kuzub. Main photo: Matthew Coughlin studied mechanical engineering, participated in research at leading institutions, and led the Student Government Association. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
Northeastern graduate awarded Knight-Hennessy Scholarship for cutting-edge thermal research and student leadership
While attending Northeastern University, Matthew Coughlin made the most of every opportunity.
The 2025 graduate studied mechanical engineering with a minor in math, completed two co-ops, and conducted research at Northeastern, MIT, the University of Delaware, and Stanford University. He also joined the student government in his first year and eventually became its president, working to improve the student experience at Northeastern.
Those efforts paid off. Coughlin was recently awarded the Knight-Hennessy Scholarship, which will fund three years of his graduate studies at Stanford. The program selects scholars from around the world who demonstrate independence of thought, leadership, and a civic mindset, and prepares them for leadership roles in academia, industry, government, and nonprofit sectors.
“It appealed to me,” Coughlin says, “because it builds an interdisciplinary cohort of students across all disciplines, and it fosters that interdisciplinary collaboration. I see a lot of value in such interdisciplinary work, because that’s how you realize very impactful solutions.”
He believes that no single breakthrough in one field is enough to bring transformative change to the world.
“It takes innovation in a field, combined with innovation in other fields, and requires synthesizing those advances to execute [impactful changes],” Coughlin says. “I put in my Knight-Hennessey application because I wanted to develop this broader skill set.”
In addition to the Knight-Hennessy Scholarship, Coughlin also received the highly competitive National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. He plans to continue working on thermal management issues in high-performance computing.
“There’s a strong demand for additional computer power,” he says. “We look towards an era that is not just dictated by AI, but more broadly, data science and a desire in every industry to have enormous data sets and be able to drive insights from them.”
But to process more data and train more AI models, engineers must fit more computing power into the same computer chips.
“It ends up being a thermally limited problem,” Coughlin says. “If we make computer chips any more dense, they overheat and they destroy themselves.”
Coughlin says that numbers made more sense to him than trying to memorize how to spell words from a young age. His natural inclination to STEM fields led him to pursue engineering—a field in which he could apply fundamental concepts from math and physics to real-world challenges.
Coughlin, who grew up in Sharon, Massachusetts, chose Northeastern for its strong engineering program, urban location, and a vibrant undergraduate community.
“It offered a very robust extracurricular scene and a good social environment,” he says.
His first research opportunity came in his first year, when he was able to work in a biomechanics lab at MIT on a pump system. Using image processing algorithms, the lab measured and characterized microfluidic flows that dictate forces experienced by biological systems.
“If you want your system to be physiologically relevant, [you need to] mimic what is found in reality,” Coughlin says. “That gave me some experience with both the bio application side of mechanical engineering, but also the computing, the processing side.”
Read full story at Northeastern Global News
See related news: A Journey of Interdisciplinary Research Experiences