19 Washington Square North Faculty Fellows

Andrea Vial’s research takes an interdisciplinary approach drawing from social psychological, sociological, organizational, and developmental perspectives to investigate how gender stereotypes and beliefs about roles contribute to employment segregation and inequality on the basis of gender. She is particularly interested in studying why people flock to gender-stereotypic roles, the barriers that they encounter when they don’t, and the conditions under which they can thrive in counter-stereotypic domains and occupations. Vial earned her PhD in Psychology from Yale University in 2018. Her work has been published in high-impact journals, including Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Journal of Applied Psychology, and covered by media outlets such as Forbes and NPR.

Andrei Cimpian earned a PhD in psychology from Stanford University in 2008 and is now Professor of Psychology at NYU. His research investigates motivation and academic achievement, with a particular focus on how educational outcomes are shaped by gender and racial/ethnic stereotypes. Cimpian’s research has been published in top journals such as Science, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and Psychological Science, earning him the 2018 American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology. Media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, NPR, and The Economist have covered his work.

Mohamad Eid received a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Ottawa, Canada, in 2010. He is currently an assistant professor of electrical engineering at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). He was previously a teaching and research associate at the University of Ottawa from June 2008 until April 2012. He is the co-author of the book: Haptics Technologies: Bringing Touch to Multimedia, Springers 2011, the technical chair of several haptic conferences. He is the recipient of several best paper awards in several international conferences such as ICBAE 2016, DS-RT 2008, and the prestigious ACM Multimedia 2009 Grand Challenge Most Entertaining Award. He has won several awards for academic and research distinction including the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Award of Excellence, University of Ottawa Excellence scholarship, and Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS) scholarship. He has more than 125 conference and journal publications and seven patents. He is a guest editor at the IEEE Transactions on Haptics journal. His academic interests include affective haptics, neurohaptics, and novel haptic interfaces.

Marci Levine, DMD, MD is a board-certified oral and maxillofacial surgeon and NYU-Dentistry's Predoctoral Director of Oral Surgery. Her primary research interest is in the development of educational strategies for teaching dental clinical skills. She is currently designing a virtual reality-based curriculum to improve instruction in local anesthesia. Levine is the Chair-Elect of the NYU-Dentistry's Academy of Distinguished Educators and she is a past recipient of the Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Foundation's Faculty Educator Development Award for outstanding early-career academic oral surgeons.

Jemima Frimpong’s research focuses on the complex dynamics of decision making, and the intersection of information processing and discrimination. Frimpong has worked extensively in health care organizations, examining how managerial attributes, including decision making, affect the adoption and implementation of innovation, treatment practices, and ultimately the health of patients. She recently launched a program of research to investigate the impact of biases (encompassing stereotyping and prejudice) on managerial decision making and behaviors. Frimpong is particularly interested in studying how managers process information about job applicants and employees, and how these processes might lead to discrimination and other adverse outcomes. She is conducting a series of experiments designed to elicit the dynamics of biases in hiring and promotion decisions. Frimpong uses a broad array of methods throughout her work, ranging from survey and lab-based experiments to randomized trials.

Alden Lai is a health care management scholar who studies people's behaviors and cognition at work to understand how employees, managers, and leaders can improve workforce wellbeing, and consequently, safety performance in health care organizations. Lai uses theories and methodologies in psychology, health services research, and organizational behavior in his interdisciplinary work. Of particular interest are how health care workers engage in job crafting and experience work as meaningful, and how managers can better enable job crafting as well as "wise" proactivity among employees. Lai has consulted for federal and state governments, health systems, biopharmaceutical companies, and philanthropies internationally. He is currently Executive Advisor to the Global Wellbeing Initiative, an effort by Gallup (US) and the Wellbeing for Planet Earth Foundation (Japan) to foster a more inclusive and diverse understanding of wellbeing for research, practice, and policy. He is also the co-editor of a book on thriving at work for early career researchers to be published by Springer in 2023. Lai obtained his PhD in Health Policy and Management with a focus on organizational behavior at Johns Hopkins University, Master of Public Health at the University of Tokyo, and BA in psychology at the National University of Singapore.

Pedro Monavile’s research focuses on the colonial and post-colonial history of the Democratic Republic of Congo. His first monograph (to be published in 2022 by Duke University Press) is a study of the Congolese student movement at the time of the global 1960s. He has also published articles and book chapters on colonial memory and Congolese popular culture. He is currently working on two main projects: a monograph about the decolonization of the Congolese Catholic Church, and the publication of an edited volume around the work of the writer and scholar André Yoka Lye.

Duncan Yoon is Assistant Professor at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. His current book, Alluvial Dreams, examines representations of China in African literature. The manuscript was awarded the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Helen Tartar First Book Subvention in 2020. He has published several articles on Africa-China cultural relations and is an executive committee member for the Modern Language Association's (MLA) forum, African Literature to 1990. He served as a Fulbright Scholar to South Korea in 2004 and was a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress in 2018.

Sarah Paul's research concerns agency and the philosophy of mind, focusing on the nature of intention and belief. She is also interested in questions about self-knowledge, self-control, and what it means to believe in ourselves and others when it comes to difficult actions. Paul came to NYUAD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has also held visiting positions at M.I.T. and Bowdoin College. The author of Philosophy of Action: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge 2021), which offers an accessible and inclusive overview of the major debates in the philosophy of action. Paul earned her BA magna cum laude from Carleton College, and her PhD from Stanford University.

Daniel Fogal is an Assistant Professor in the Program in Bioethics and Faculty Adviser for the Bioethics Minor at NYU’s School of Global Public Health. He earned his BA from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 2006 and his PhD from NYU in 2016. Prior to his current appointment, Fogal was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the NYU Center for Bioethics, and prior to that he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Uppsala University in association with the Varieties of Normativity project (principal investigator: Matti Eklund). 

Fogal specializes in ethics, epistemology, and philosophy of language. Current work includes the nature of good reasoning, the notion of rationality relevant to decision-making capacity and informed consent, and conceptual engineering in bioethics. Past research has included work on the nature of rationality (“Rational Requirements and the Primacy of Pressure,” Mind), the nature of normative explanations (“The Metaphysics of Moral Explanations,” Oxford Studies in Metaethics), and the nature of both normative and motivating reasons (“Reasons, Reason, and Context,” in Weighing Reasons; “Deflationary Pluralism about Motivating Reasons,” in The Factive Turn in Epistemology). In addition to teaching and research, Fogal has been active in philosophical outreach programs and in organizing professional conferences and workshops.

Dave Russell’s research interests concern accreting compact objects — black holes and neutron stars — and their energetic output in the form of radiation and jets. His work, analyzing a wealth of broadband (radio-infrared-optical-ultraviolet-X-ray) observations of X-ray binaries, has led to a deeper understanding of the accretion process in the extreme gravitational fields near compact objects. His current projects include investigating how outbursts start, how relativistic jets are launched and accelerated, how fast relativistic jets are in black holes in our galaxy, and how universal accretion and jet properties are, from small black holes to supermassive black holes.

In a form of "stellar forensics" investigation, Maryam Modjaz and her team of stellar death detectives are pinpointing the stellar progenitors and the explosion conditions that lead to the various forms of stellar death for a massive star, in particular by examining the habitats of different kinds of explosions. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2007 and a BS from the University of California at Berkeley in 2000, where she also worked as a Miller Fellow from 2007-2010. In 2010-2011 she was a Hubble Fellow at Columbia University. The recipient of Harvard University's Fireman Prize for an outstanding PhD dissertation, her work has been featured on NPR, on Science360.org, in Astronomy Now, and in a feature article in UC Berkeley's California magazine. Modjaz has also appeared on stand-up comedy shows in NYC and on Swiss TV, and in September 2016, she was featured in the Apple ad for iPhone7 and Apple Watch Series 2 in her capacity as physics professor at NYU’s Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics, garnering roughly 7 million views on YouTube.