NYUAD has taken strong steps to develop a world-class research university in Abu Dhabi. It has recruited research faculty in science, engineering, and the social sciences; active scholars in the humanities; and creative artists in the arts. In addition, to provide an initial focus for advanced research and scholarship, and to build on the research strengths of NYUNY, NYUAD has established 12 centers, labs, and special projects through the NYUAD Institute.

To support these endeavors, significant investments have been made in research equipment and instrumentation at the Center for Science and Engineering, with core facilities established in areas such as molecular characterization, imaging and microscopy, genomics, digital manufacturing, and materials science.

In addition, the largest high performance computer in the UAE is now operational and will support computational research in astrophysics, climate modeling, and genomics through numerical modeling, simulation, and numerical analyses. Faculty in the areas of biology, chemistry, engineering, physics, and psychology will use the supercomputer — a large HPC Linux Cluster called BuTinah — which performs at approximately 70 TFLOPS (Tera or Trillion floating point operations per second) and consists of 512 high-density compute nodes with 12 CPU cores and 48GB of memory each, eight high-memory compute nodes with 192GB of memory each, 16 GPU (Graphical Processing Units) nodes, and 16 visualization nodes. It is interconnected via a high-speed, low-latency Infiniband network offering speeds of 40Gb per second.

An interdisciplinary laboratory, the Social Science Experimental Lab (SSEL) has also been established for experimental studies in the social sciences.

Additional facilities to support the creative arts, social sciences, and new areas in science and engineering will be developed as faculty develop their research programs.