Sarah Ostadabbas

Sarah Ostadabbas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University's College of Engineering. She serves as Director of the Augmented Cognition Laboratory (ACLab), Director of the Women in Engineering (WIE) Program, and Co-Director of the Center for Signal Processing, Imaging, Reasoning, and Learning (SPIRAL). Her research bridges computer vision, machine learning, and human-computer interaction, with applications in medical and military domains.

• Postdoctoral Research - Georgia Tech (2015)
• PhD - Electrical & Computer Engineering (Signal Processing) at University of Texas at Dallas (2014)
• MS - Electrical Engineering (Control) at Sharif University of Technology (2007)
• BS - Electrical Engineering (Electronics) at Amirkabir University of Technology (2006)
• BS - Electrical Engineering (Biomedical) at Amirkabir University of Technology (2005)

Her research focuses on representation learning in visual perception, particularly for human and animal behavior modeling through biomechanical analysis. She also pioneers solutions for Small Data challenges in privacy-sensitive domains, integrating domain knowledge into generative models and enhancing cross-domain generalization.

Key article themes include pose estimation, computer vision in healthcare, time-series modeling, and data-efficient machine learning. Awards include the NSF CAREER Award (2022), Sony Faculty Innovation Award (2023), and the 2025 Constantinos Mavroidis Translational Research Award. She has advised 15+ graduate students and postdocs, with lab projects funded by NSF, DoD, Amazon, and Biogen.

• NSF CAREER Award (2022)
• Sony Faculty Innovation Award (2023)
• Oracle Excellence Award Runner-up (2023)
• LDV Capital Recognition (2024)
• COE Faculty Fellow (2025)
• Constantinos Mavroidis Translational Research Award (2025)
• Cade Prize for Inventivity (2024)

Her students have contributed to projects on infant monitoring, virtual rehabilitation, and edge-friendly pose estimation. The ACLab collaborates with institutions like MathWorks, Amazon, and MIT Lincoln Lab, with recent work on battlefield casualty care AI and age-inclusive VR systems.