19 Washington Square North Faculty Fellows

This collaborative project investigates how epigenetic variation can be harnessed to improve the climate resilience of apple trees, a crucial perennial crop facing increasing environmental pressures. Using cutting-edge sequencing, gene expression analyses, and computational biology, the team will investigate how stress-induced epigenomic changes influence the plasticity and adaptive potential of apple trees. The study focuses on genetically identical cultivars grown for five years across three contrasting climates, offering a rare opportunity to detect environment-driven epigenomic divergence. The collaboration brings together NYUAD’s strength in experimental genomics and apple biology with NYU’s expertise in gene regulatory network modeling. By integrating these approaches, the project will test whether stress-induced epigenetic changes are heritable, potentially opening new pathways for breeding climate-resilient fruit trees.

Fellows

• Amandine Cornille, Associate Professor of Biology, NYUAD
• Carol Huang, Associate Professor of Biology, NYU

Photoswitches are chromophores that undergo reversible changes in structure upon light irradiation, usually through isomerization. Integration of photoswitches into structured materials such as hydrogels or polymers enhance their functionality, as their optical and structural properties are changed via interactions with the matrix. Although photoswitches such as azobenzenes, diarylethylenes, and hemithioindigo have been widely studied in solution, molecular-level studies of photoswitches embedded in gels or polymers have been lacking. Optimization strategies of these ‘smart materials’ rely on the ability to characterise π-π stacking interactions, covalent and non-covalent interactions between photoswitch and matrix material. These interactions can be challenging to quantify, particularly if the matrix is non-crystalline, which limits the utility of X-ray methods.

In this proposal, we aim to address a gap in knowledge regarding the molecular interactions between solid-state photoswitches and their local environment. Leveraging the combined expertise of NYU New York and NYU Abu Dhabi, we will use a combination of multi-dimensional solid-state NMR, EPR, and relaxation studies to measure changes in the structure and dynamics that occur at the interface before and after light irradiation. This study will significantly impact our understanding of the molecular interactions between photoswitches and at the photoswitch-matrix interface.

Fellows

• Brijith Thomas, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, NYUAD
• Claudia Avalos, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, NYU

Our 19 WSN Fellowship project takes as its inspiration the Akkasah photography archive at NYUAD. With images dating from the late nineteenth century to chromatic contemporary landscapes, Akkasah contains over thirty thousand photographs of life in the Middle East and North Africa. Our objective is to learn about these photographs and to respond through an artist book combining Pardlo’s poetry and Ray’s photography. In close collaboration with NYUAD archivists, we will attend especially to themes of family and collecting: for example, what does it mean to meditate on the protective yet near-total absence of women in the Al Qassim Family Collection? How might we “see” family in the context of such absence? Similarly, what do we make of the early twentieth-century photograph in the Yasser Alwan Collection’s Egyptian Family Series of two women kissing? How does this demonstration of affection spin visualizations of intimacy when viewed among the collection’s many stoic wedding portraits? As an international collaboration, this project invites comparative inquiries regarding family photography collections at other NYU sites; for example, the family scrapbook of a Panamanian student relaxing in the late 1930s with her NYU New York cohort in Washington Square Park.

During our fellowship year, we will experiment with various combinations of text and image: extending important ideas in our previous work: for example, Pardlo has long been engaged in a practice of ekphrasis, which he views as a kind of translation. Ray, meanwhile, is a translator who is eager to explore how one might translate via the medium of photography: translating a poem into a photograph or a photograph into another photograph.

Many developing countries are at severe risk of debt crises, with over half of low-income countries and a quarter of emerging markets facing high debt distress. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank play a crucial role in addressing these crises by assessing a country’s default risk and facilitating creditor coordination. Crucial to this process is the Debt Sustainability Analysis (DSA) they provide, essentially a risk assessment based on a country’s macroeconomic conditions.

This project investigates if and how geopolitical dynamics affect the sentiments and creditworthiness scores offered in the DSAs. To achieve this goal, we will: 1) create an original dataset drawn from the full set of published DSAs, 2) detect deviations between actual DSAs and those predicted based solely on economic conditions, and 3) theorize and test the role of major and rising powers (such as China), as well new creditors (such as Saudi Arabia and India), in shaping DSA outcomes. This project offers insights into international debt relief coordination, major power influence within international organizations, and on the challenges and opportunities for sovereign debt management following the rise of new creditor states.

For centuries, the western Indian Ocean region has served as a nexus of trade and cultural exchange, bridging East Africa, the African Horn, West Asia (i.e. the “Middle East” and Arabian Gulf), South Asia, and, since the eighteenth century, Europe. Linguistically, the region is marked by intensive processes of creolization, resulting in language situations that are not only diverse but entwined, in which even local languages from disparate language families bear structural connections that speak to centuries of being fused and blended in everyday communication and artistic expression. Scholars of language and culture in the western Indian Ocean have long taken it as axiomatic that such language situations not only reflect but also impact subject formation and social relations in the region. In recent years, some of these scholars have argued that the most profound impacts reside at the level of affect and emotion, in subjective experiences and nonrepresentational practices that can only be effectively approached by attending to the materiality and embodied experience of language. Approaching this task from the direction of sound studies and sound art, this project engages in an ethnographic and artistic exploration of the vocalic soundworld of East Africa’s “Swahili coast.” We frame our ethnographic and artistic object of inquiry as “sonic intimacies,” by which we mean the nondiscursive linkages, associations, and affinities between local languages that are enacted in everyday communication and artistic expression, and which sometimes—or perhaps always, to varying extents—serve as vehicles for felt understandings of the linkages, associations, and affinities between different communities of speakers. 

This project is an experiment in methodology that proceeds from the premise that art and research inform and enrich each other in humanistic inquiry. Working collaboratively with intellectuals and artists from the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa, we will engage creatively with archival sound materials to create an artistic sound installation that enables listeners to encounter and reflect upon the experience of living in and with the polyphony of interrelated languages and ways of vocalizing that one encounters every day in Mombasa and other Swahili port cities. Adventurous though our methodological intervention may be, the project also stands as a somewhat organic response to recent works in Indian Ocean studies that have highlighted the role of the aesthetic, in the Aristotelian sense of sensuous engagement with and knowledge of the world, in how Indian-Ocean subjects incorporate histories of migration and diasporic connection into local understandings of place and social belonging. Anticipated contributions include a rich set of observations and reflections about the sonic-aesthetic world of the Swahili coast and the broader region of the western Indian Ocean, and an equally rich set of observations and reflections about the relationship between art and research in humanistic inquiry. Our intention is to establish a dialogue between art and research as two ways of knowing, leveraging the power of art-making to access ideas that may not yet be articulated or articulable, and the power of humanistic research to hone questions that open up new insights.

High-resolution photography, photogrammetry, and digital scans provide the most cutting-edge heritage technology for cultural preservation. This also helps in documenting and preserving fieldwork data and potentially displaying some of it to both local and global audiences for promoting cultural awareness. The purpose of this year’s digital heritage project is to three dimensionally scan pre-Islamic rock art from the southeastern Arabian Peninsula. These artifacts have been deposited across old caravan routes in the form of paintings, pecked-incised engravings, and alphabetic inscriptions on cave shelter walls and on stones in the wadis of the desert landscapes. The project is a continuation of Zimmerle’s fieldwork and traveling exhibition, Cultural Treasures from the Cave Shelters of Dhofar: A Digital Humanities Initiative for Exhibiting the Rock Art & Inscriptions of Southern Oman as Heritage, previously under the auspices of The Diwan of the Royal Court in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman, and the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center in Washington, DC, but also includes tracing and scanning old and new rock art discoveries from each emirate in the United Arab Emirates. Some of the findings of this work will be 3D printed as digital case studies to create a virtual exhibition of curated artifacts from the Arabian Peninsula. 

Extensive periods of weathering and heritage vandalism at many sites require mitigating strategies to preserve and protect the best-preserved painted rock art of pre-Islamic Arabia. Both the website that we are developing, and our multidimensional printing and analytical photogrammetry techniques and tools — designed by Behera and Zimmerle — will provide ways to exhibit replicated forms of these artifacts to scale with potential future outputs to preserve petroglyphs in the field for both academic study and museum sensory experiences. Our eventual goal is to share a reliable digital version of the rock art corpora with the international museum community in the form of digital databases and physical scaled models geared toward global cultural preservation.

Misinformation, and its targeted counterpart disinformation, has become a major concern in the open online world where everyone can contribute information that can be publicly accessed. This has only been aggravated by the recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and Large Language Models (LLMs) that allow text and information to be created at scale without human effort and thus raise serious concerns about their harmful implications.

This project develops methodologies that aim to evaluate the trustworthiness of automatically generated text from large-scale language models, such as the one used in ChatGPT. We will investigate and suggest methods for evaluating the stability and factual correctness of LLM-generated text and investigate these questions across multiple AI-based systems. Our goal is to better understand the harms that can be caused and develop techniques for their early detection. We will also design measures and develop tools for a more trustworthy use of generative AI-based text tools.

In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, diverse political actors across the MENA region — from armed groups and clerics to activists and politicians — flocked to social media to organize, reach their constituencies, and amplify their causes. As these actors create content and interact with others, they leave behind digital traces of their strategic communication and the networks through which it spreads. Taking advantage of this rich record of online behavior, we plan to develop an infrastructure for tracking shifts in political alliances, including extremism, sectarianization, and polarization, in countries across the Middle East.

This will allow us to monitor emerging threats to regional stability both in the immediate aftermath of events on the ground and over long-range time horizons. To reach this goal, we plan to carry out the following three research objectives: 1) creating a database of tens of thousands of political, economic, religious, and cultural elites’ online communication, eventually across 28 countries of the Middle East, with this first phase of the project focusing on four countries as a proof-of-concept; 2) developing scalable approaches to mapping and measuring shifting polarization, sectarianism, and extremism among these actors and their followers over time; and 3) training the next generation of analysts of Arab social media data to improve and continue scaling our approach to real-time threat monitoring in the MENA region.

This project seeks to develop and evaluate haptic (tactile) feedback in a virtual reality (VR) local anesthesia training simulation. In addition to immersive visual experience, the simulation provides the tactile sensation of inserting a real needle in a patient using a haptic interface designed specifically for this purpose. A 3D printed Carpule syringe will be designed and attached to a Geomagic haptic interface to provide a realistic grip experience in addition to providing force feedback during the anesthesia procedure. 

Haptic data such as position, orientation, force, speed, etc., will be recorded to provide quantitative measures of the quality of performance. The ability of haptic feedback to improve learning outcomes will be evaluated using an experimental study with dental professors and students from NYU’s College of Dentistry. Moreover, the results from quantitative evaluation will be cross-validated using subjective feedback from dental professors and students.

Our project for the Fellowship brings together a series of initiatives: two online events, a co-authored translation, an artistic installation, and the preparation of a journal issue dedicated to the memory of the Congolese scholar Tshikala Kayembe Biaya.

These activities all concur to investigate the intersections among artistic creation, social criticism, and scholarship in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo.

Black Holes (BHs) and Neutron Stars (NSs) are the densest objects in the Universe — indeed, BHs are so dense that even light, the fastest thing in the universe, cannot escape their superstrong gravitational pull — but how exactly they are born is still an outstanding question. We know they are produced during the deaths of massive stars, but whether they are produced from different kinds of massive star explosions called core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe), or from gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), which are extremely energetic explosions, is still highly debated. 

This project combines the expertise of two professors in a new way, for the first time, to attack this question in a two-pronged approach. This approach will impact many fields of astrophysics and answer fundamental questions about which kinds of stellar systems undergo which kinds of death, i.e., explode as which kind of SNe and which kind of remnants they leave behind.