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NYU Abu Dhabi Professors Awarded Prestigious Research Grants

NYU Abu Dhabi downtown campus building exterior with logo.

Press Release

Faculty members at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) have received four new grants — from the National Science Foundation, the US Embassy to the United Arab Emirates, and the NYUAD Research Institute — to pursue pioneering research projects across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and engineering.

“These awards demonstrate stellar achievements by our faculty and we celebrate their successes today. It is telling that these new awards span engineering, social science, the humanities, and arts — a recognition of the breadth of work being done at NYUAD,” said NYUAD Provost Fabio Piano. “These new grants continue to solidify the trajectory of NYUAD as a center of knowledge creation in Abu Dhabi.”

Among these new grants, the National Science Foundation (NSF) — an independent US government agency supporting scientific research — has awarded two research grants to faculty members at NYUAD following a highly competitive, peer-reviewed proposal process in competition with faculty from top institutions in the US and around the world.

Ozgur Sinanoglu, assistant professor of Engineering at NYUAD, alongside Ramesh Karri, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Polytechnic Institute of NYU (NYU-Poly), will use their three-year USD 500,000 grant to further their research in developing improved methods and new techniques to safeguard the security, quality, and design of electronic chip hardware. With the emergence of a decentralized process for chip design and fabrication, the entry of counterfeit and defective chips into the global supply chain is a growing threat that may compromise the quality of the applications they are used in, while leading to potential financial losses and posing a threat to safety and security. With the project “Adapting VLSI Test Principles for VLSI Trust” Sinanoglu, principal investigator of the project, and Karri, co-principal investigator, will aim to improve the reliability and efficacy of techniques, such as logic encryption and split manufacturing, which protect against these threats.

NYUAD Associate Dean of Social Science Hannah Brückner, working in collaboration with Yale University Professor Julia Adams, has also received NSF funding, a two-year grant for USD 70,000 to investigate indications of systematic gender bias in both contributors and content in the reference tool Wikipedia. The project, “Collaborative Research: Wikipedia and the Democratization of Academic Knowledge,” will study mechanisms that potentially influence gender bias in the contributor-based resource, and the prevalence of gender bias across different academic disciplines. The project will use both quantitative and qualitative methods to identify gender-specific patterns on the representation of scholars and scholarship, ultimately revealing important insights about where gender disparities arise in the process of democratized knowledge.

Additionally, the NYUAD Institute has announced the award of a five-year humanities research fellowship based in Abu Dhabi. This is the third round of grants that have been issued by the NYUAD Institute to support research and scholarly activities in Abu Dhabi.

Led by NYUAD Vice Provost of Intellectual and Cultural Outreach Reindert Falkenburg and Lauren Benton, NYU dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science, the annual fellowship will bring distinguished senior and junior scholars in the Humanities to NYUAD for residential fellowships each year to further their scholarship in their respective disciplines — with a particular focus on topics related to the Arab world. The Fellows will contribute to NYUAD's intellectual community through research and research-related activities, including sharing their work with the NYUAD and Abu Dhabi communities.

The US Embassy to the United Arab Emirates has also awarded two grants for a project called “Intersections: Highlighting the Connections between US and UAE Cultures.” With these funds, NYUAD will develop two public lecture series focusing on Arabic and American literature and art, conducted by NYUAD faculty and select guest speakers, to be held at universities and other venues throughout the UAE.

About NYU Abu Dhabi

NYU Abu Dhabi is the first comprehensive liberal arts and research campus in the Middle East to be operated abroad by a major American research university. NYU Abu Dhabi has integrated a highly selective undergraduate curriculum across the disciplines with a world center for advanced research and scholarship. The university enables its students in the sciences, engineering, social sciences, humanities, and arts to succeed in an increasingly interdependent world and advance cooperation and progress on humanity’s shared challenges. NYU Abu Dhabi’s high-achieving students have come from over 115 countries and speak over 115 languages. Together, NYU's campuses in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai form the backbone of a unique global university, giving faculty and students opportunities to experience varied learning environments and immersion in other cultures at one or more of the numerous study-abroad sites NYU maintains on six continents.