Divisional Deans

Arts and Humanities

Awam Amkpa is the Dean of Arts and Humanities at New York University Abu Dhabi. Awam is an accomplished and world-renowned theater scholar and practitioner-director, playwright and actor, filmmaker and curator of visual and performing arts. He is a professor of Drama and Cultural Theory at the departments of Drama, Tisch School of the Arts and Social and Cultural Analysis, Faculty of Arts and Sciences at New York University and of Film and New Media at NYU Abu Dhabi.

Awam received his BA in Dramatic Arts at Obafemi Awolowo University and his MA in Drama at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria, and completed his PhD in Drama at the University of Bristol in the UK. Before coming to NYU, Awam was a Senior Lecturer of Drama and Television at King Alfred’s University College in Winchester, England, and Assistant Professor of Theater Arts at Mount Holyoke College in the US.

He is the author of Theatre and Postcolonial Desires, the Look-book Archetypes, Stereotypes and Polytypes: Theaters of the Black Atlantic, art catalogs ReSignifications, Africa: See You, See Me; AfroEuropa:Incontri, and several articles in books and journals on modernisms in theater, postcolonial theater, Black Atlantic studies, and film studies. Additionally, he was the director of film documentaries including Winds Against Our Souls, It's All About Downtown, National Images and Transnational Desires, A Very, Very Short Story of Nollywood, wole Soyinka: A Humanist Ode For Chibok, and feature film Wazobia!. As an interdisciplinary artist and scholar, Awam continues to curate and exhibit globally, make films, work in performance art and present his multifaceted scholarship in venues across the world.

Engineering

Samer Madanat is the Xenel Distinguished Professor of Engineering, former Chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and former Director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.​ ​

Samer received a BSc in Civil Engineering from the University of Jordan in 1986, and an MS and PhD in Transportation Systems from MIT in 1988 and 1991 respectively.

His research and teaching interests are in the area of transportation infrastructure management, with an emphasis on modeling facility performance, the development of optimal management policies under uncertainty, and developing solutions for improving the sustainability of transportation systems.

Science

Francesco Arneodo is an experimental physicist  interested in detectors for particle physics and their applications He joined NYU Abu Dhabi in 2013, and established the Astroparticle Laboratory, a research group dedicated to the search for Dark Matter, as well as space science and the application of scientific methods to cultural heritage and conservation science. He served as Associate Dean of Science from 2016 to 2021 and was recently appointed Interim Dean of Science in 2025.

Francesco’s research career began at the Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy, where he worked on cosmic rays with the EAS-TOP experiment and on neutrino physics with liquid argon detectors. Since 2004, he has been an active member of the XENON program, an international collaboration that designs and operates liquid xenon detectors for Dark Matter research.

He holds a PhD from the University of Rome - La Sapienza and a Master’s degree from the University of Torino, Italy. Demonstrating a keen interest in the socio-economic aspects of science, he also earned an MBA from the University of Warwick in the UK.

In his free time, Francesco enjoys climbing and sailing, two of his lifelong passions.

Social Science

Paula England is Dean of Social Science at NYU Abu Dhabi. She is also a Research Affiliate of the Center for Applied Social and Economic Research at NYU Shanghai and previously held the position of Silver Professor of Arts and Sciences at NYU New York. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago, and has held previous professorships at the University of Texas-Dallas, University of Arizona, University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern University, and Stanford University.

Paula’s previous leadership experience includes the Directorship of Women’s Studies and the Alice Paul Research Center at University of Pennsylvania, and chairing the NYU Department of Sociology. She has also served as President of the American Sociological Association (2014-2015) and Editor of the American Sociological Review.

Paula’s research focuses on the gender gap in pay, occupational segregation, how couples divide housework, the wage penalty for motherhood, and how relationship and family patterns are changing. She is the author of two books, Households, Employment, and Gender: A Social, Economic, and Demographic View, and Comparable Worth: Theories and Evidence. She is also the author of many articles, published in American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Demography, Social Forces, PNAS, and elsewhere. In addition to awards for her research from the American Sociological Association and the Population Association of America, Paula was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2018.