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University research hub receives over $1 million in funding from New York senator

NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge received $1.15 million from New York Sen. Chuck Schumer through a Congressionally Directed Spending request — a portion of the federal budget that individual members of Congress can use to support projects in their respective state. The university said the institute will use the funding to develop tools aimed at better addressing “New York’s most pressing public policy problems.”

Michael Koncewicz, the associate director of the institute, said that in the institute’s initial CDS request to Schumer, the IPK pitched projects centering around climate change and environmental justice, racial equality, the future of democracy and the social implications of artificial intelligence.

“All of us at the Institute for Public Knowledge are delighted about this award and grateful to Sen. Schumer for his support,” Koncewicz wrote to WSN. 

For the 2025 fiscal year, Schumer accepted requests from state and local government entities along with nonprofit organizations based in New York through April 5. The IPK — based in 20 Cooper Square, where NYU’s journalism department is also located — aims to research “ issues of public concern ” and serves as a hub for scholars, graduate students and state or local organizations to advance policymaking. 

The IPK is currently conducting a study titled The Social Life of Climate Change , in which it uses interviews to examine how climate change impacts Americans in their daily lives. The institute also coordinates the NYU Cities Collaborative — which provides a platform for dialogue and research on urban issues — and has six working groups dedicated to exploring specific areas of research, including political polarization and racial disparities in public spaces. 

This is not the first time that Schumer has helped fund initiatives at NYU. In September 2023, he and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand announced that the National Science Foundation would allot $4.5 million in federal funds toward the development of machine learning models at the university. Schumer said the funding would be allocated toward the creation of technologies and software infrastructure that could help with the development of materials for clean energy conversion and storage, water purification and drug delivery. 

A spokesperson for Schumer and the university did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Contact Aashna Miharia at [email protected] .

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Research Briefs

Cutting-edge enzyme research fights back against plastic pollution

From catalysis today.

NYU Tandon study exposes failings of measures to prevent illegal content generation by text-to-image AI models

From iclr conference paper.

NYC ranks safest among big U.S. cities for gun violence, new research from NYU Tandon School of Engineering reveals

From nature cities, briefs listing.

Unveiling biochemical defenses against chemical warfare

In the clandestine world of biochemical warfare, researchers are continuously seeking innovative strategies to counteract lethal agents. Researchers led by Jin Kim Montclare , Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, have embarked on a pioneering mission to develop enzymatic defenses against chemical threats, as revealed in a recent study.

The team's focus lies in crafting enzymes capable of neutralizing notorious warfare agents such as VX, renowned for their swift and devastating effects on the nervous system. Through meticulous computational design, they harnessed the power of enzymes like phosphotesterase (PTE), traditionally adept at detoxifying organophosphates found in pesticides, to target VX agents. 

The study utilized computational techniques to design a diverse library of PTE variants optimized for targeting lethal organophosphorus nerve agents. Leveraging advanced modeling software, such as Rosetta, the researchers meticulously crafted enzyme variants tailored to enhance efficacy against these formidable threats. When they tested these new enzyme versions in the lab, they found that three of them were much better at breaking down VX and VR. Their findings showcased the effectiveness of these engineered enzymes in neutralizing these chemicals.

A key problem in treating these agents lies in the urgency of application. In the event of exposure, rapid intervention becomes paramount. The research emphasizes potential applications, ranging from prophylactic measures to immediate administration upon exposure, underscoring the imperative for swift action to mitigate the agents' lethal effects.

Another key issue is protein stability — ensuring that the proteins can stay intact and at the site of affected tissue which is  crucial for therapeutic applications. Ensuring enzymes remain stable within the body enhances their longevity and effectiveness, offering prolonged protection against chemical agents.

Looking ahead, Montclare's team aims to optimize enzyme stability and efficacy further, paving the way for practical applications in chemical defense and therapeutics. Their work represents a beacon of hope in the ongoing battle against chemical threats, promising safer and more effective strategies to safeguard lives.

Kronenberg, J., Chu, S., Olsen, A., Britton, D., Halvorsen, L., Guo, S., Lakshmi, A., Chen, J., Kulapurathazhe, M. J., Baker, C. A., Wadsworth, B. C., Van Acker, C. J., Lehman, J. G., Otto, T. C., Renfrew, P. D., Bonneau, R., & Montclare, J. K. (2024). Computational design of phosphotriesterase improves v‐agent degradation efficiency. ChemistryOpen. https://doi.org/10.1002/open.202300263

• Jin Kim Montclare

Since the 1950s, the surge in global plastic production has paralleled a concerning rise in plastic waste. In the United States alone, a staggering 35 million tons of plastic waste were generated in 2017, with only a fraction being recycled or combusted, leaving the majority to languish in landfills. Polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a key contributor to plastic waste, particularly from food packaging, poses significant environmental challenges due to its slow decomposition and pollution.

Efforts to tackle this issue have intensified, with researchers exploring innovative solutions such as harnessing the power of microorganisms and enzymes for PET degradation. However, existing enzymes often fall short in terms of efficiency, especially at temperatures conducive to industrial applications.

Enter cutinase, a promising enzyme known for its ability to break down PET effectively. Derived from organisms like Fusarium solani , cutinase has shown remarkable potential in degrading PET and other polymeric substrates. Recent breakthroughs include the discovery of leaf and branch compost cutinase (LCC), exhibiting unprecedented PET degradation rates at high temperatures, and IsPETase, which excels at lower temperatures.

In a recent study, researchers from NYU Tandon led by Jin Kim Montclare , Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, presented a novel computational screening workflow utilizing advanced protocols to design variants of LCC with improved PET degradation capabilities similar to those in isPETase. By integrating computational modeling with biochemical assays, they have identified promising variants exhibiting increased hydrolysis behavior, even at moderate temperatures.

This study underscores the transformative potential of computational screening in enzyme redesign, offering new avenues for addressing plastic pollution. By incorporating insights from natural enzymes like IsPETase, researchers are paving the way for the development of highly efficient PET-hydrolyzing enzymes with significant implications for environmental sustainability.

Britton, D., Liu, C., Xiao, Y., Jia, S., Legocki, J., Kronenberg, J., & Montclare, J. K. (2024). Protein-engineered leaf and branch compost cutinase variants using computational screening and ispetase homology. Catalysis Today, 433, 114659. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cattod.2024.114659

Data science can be a valuable tool for analyzing social determinants of health and help solve root causes of health inequities

Data science methods can help overcome challenges in measuring and analyzing social determinants of health (SDoH), according to a paper published in Lancet Digital Health, helping mitigate the root causes of health inequities that are not fully addressed through health care spending or lifestyle choices.

The paper came out of the NYU-Moi Data Science Social Determinants Training Program (DSSD), a collaboration between New York University, the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, Moi University, and Brown University that is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Through interdisciplinary training at NYU, DSSD aims to build a cohort of data science trainees from Kenya. 

Rumi Chunara , associate professor at both NYU Tandon School of Engineering and NYU School of Global Public Health, is a DSSD Program Principal Investigator and wrote the paper with colleagues from DSSD’s collaborating institutions and the NIH.

SDoH are the diverse conditions in people's environments that affect their health, such as racism and climate. These conditions can negatively impact quality of life and health outcomes by shaping economic policies, social norms, and other environmental factors that consequently influence individual behaviors.

According to the researchers, the three main challenges — and potential solutions — in studying SDoH are:

• SDoH data is hard to measure, especially at multiple levels like individual, community, and national, with racism being one notable example. Data science methods can help capture social determinants of health not easily quantified, like racism or climate impacts, from unstructured data sources including social media, notes, or imagery. For example, natural language processing can extract housing insecurity from medical notes, and deep learning can parse environmental factors from satellite imagery. These unstructured sources provide diverse insights compared to tabular, structured data, but also may contain biases requiring careful inspection. Incorporating social determinants from flexible, unstructured sources into analyses can better capture the heterogeneity of health effects across different populations.
• SDoH impact health through complex, nonlinear pathways over time. Social factors like income or education are farther removed from health outcomes than medical factors. They affect health through complicated chains of intermediate factors that can also flow back to influence the social factors. For instance, income provides resources for healthy behaviors that improve health, while poor health hinders income. Advanced modeling techniques like machine learning can handle these tangled relationships between many variables better than simpler statistical models. Models that simulate individuals' behaviors and interactions allow studying how health patterns emerge from social factors. This captures the real-world complexity traditional models may miss between broad social conditions and individual health.
• It takes a long time, sometimes decades, to observe how SDoH ultimately affect health outcomes . For example, lack of fresh produce and recreation options leads to poor nutrition, but chronic diseases take decades to develop. Longitudinal data over such time spans is rare, especially globally. Collecting representative surveys is resource-intensive. But novel digital data like mobile usage, purchases, or satellite imagery can provide longitudinal views at granular place and time scales. With proper privacy protections and population considerations, these new data managed with data science methods can help model social determinants' long-term health impacts.

Fully leveraging data science for SDoH research requires diverse experts working collaboratively across disciplines, according to the researchers. Training more data scientists, especially from underrepresented backgrounds, in SDoH is pivotal. Developing local data science skills grounded in community knowledge and values is also vital.

Along with Chunara, the paper’s authors are: Jessica Gjonaj from NYU School of Global Public Health and NYU Grossman;  Rajesh Vedanthan from NYU Grossman; Eileen Immaculate, Iris Wanga, Judith Mangeni and Ann Mwangi from the College of Health Sciences at Moi University (Eldoret, Kenya);  James Alaro and Lori A. J. Scott-Sheldon from the National Institutes of Health; and Joseph Hogan from Brown University.

Chunara, R., Gjonaj, J., Immaculate, E.  et al.  Social determinants of health: the need for data science methods and capacity.  The Lancet Digital Health ,  6 (4), e235–e237 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1016/S2589-7500(24)00022-0

• Rumi Chunara

How can music choices affect productivity?

Human brain states are unobserved states that can constantly change due to internal and external factors, including cognitive arousal, a.k.a. intensity of emotion, and cognitive performance states. Maintaining a proper level of cognitive arousal may result in being more productive throughout daily cognitive activities. Therefore, monitoring and regulating one’s arousal state based on cognitive performance via simple everyday interventions such as music is a critical topic to be investigated. 

Researchers from NYU Tandon led by Rose Faghih — inspired by the Yerkes-Dodson law in psychology, known as the inverted-U law — investigated the arousal-performance link throughout a cognitive task in the presence of personalized music. The Yerkes-Dodson law states that performance is a function of arousal and has an inverted-U shaped relationship with cognitive arousal, i.e., a moderate level of arousal results in optimal performance, on the other hand, an excessively high level of arousal may result in anxiety, while a deficient level of arousal may be followed by boredom. 

In this study, participants selected music with calming and exciting music components to mimic the low and high-arousing environment. To decode the underlying arousal and performance with respect to everyday life settings, they used peripheral physiological data as well as behavioral signals within the Bayesian Decoders. In particular, electrodermal activity (EDA) has been widely used as a quantitative arousal index. In parallel, behavioral data such as a sequence of correct/incorrect responses and reaction time are common cognitive performance observations. 

The decoded arousal and performance data points in the arousal-performance frame depict an inverted U shape, which conforms with the Yerkes-Dodson law. Also, findings present the overall better performance of participants within the exciting background music. Considering the Yerkes-Dodson law, we develop a performance-based arousal decoder that can preserve and account for the cognitive performance dynamic. Such a decoder can provide a profound insight into how physiological responses and cognitive states interplay to influence productivity.

Although several factors, such as the nature of the cognitive task, the participant’s baseline, and the type of applied music, can impact the outcome, it might be feasible to enhance cognitive performance and shift one’s arousal from either the left or right side of the curve using music. In particular, the baseline of arousal level varies among humans, and the music may be selected to set the arousal within the desired range. The outcome of this research can advance researchers closer to developing a practical and personalized closed-loop brain-computer interface for regulating internal brain states within everyday life activities.

S. Khazaei, M. R. Amin, M. Tahir and R. T. Faghih, "Bayesian Inference of Hidden Cognitive Performance and Arousal States in Presence of Music," in IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology, doi: 10.1109/OJEMB.2024.3377923.

• Rose Faghih

New bioengineered protein design shows promise in fighting COVID-19

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists have been racing to develop effective treatments and preventatives against the virus. A recent scientific breakthrough has emerged from the work of researchers aiming to combat SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19.

Led by Jin Kim Montclare and her team, the study focuses on the design and development of a novel protein capable of binding to the spike proteins found on the surface of the coronavirus. The goal behind this innovative approach is twofold: first, to identify and recognize the virus for diagnostic purposes, and second, to hinder its ability to infect human cells.

The engineered protein, resembling a structure with five arms, exhibits a unique feature—a hydrophobic pore within its coiled-coil configuration. This feature enables the protein not only to bind to the virus but also to capture small molecules, such as the antiviral drug Ritonavir.

Ritonavir, already utilized in the treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infections, serves as a logical choice for integration into this protein-based therapeutic. By incorporating Ritonavir into the protein, the researchers aim to enhance the treatment's efficacy while simultaneously targeting the virus directly.

The study marks a significant advancement in the fight against COVID-19, showcasing a multifaceted approach to combating the virus. Through a combination of protein engineering and computational design, the team has devised a promising strategy that may revolutionize current treatment modalities.

Although the research is still in its early stages, with no human or animal trials conducted as yet, the findings offer a proof of principle for the therapeutic potential of the designed protein. The team has demonstrated its ability to enhance the protein's binding affinity to the virus spike protein, laying the groundwork for future investigations.

The potential applications of this protein-based therapeutic extend beyond COVID-19. Its versatility opens doors to combating a range of viral infections, offering a dual mode of action—preventing viral entry into human cells and neutralizing virus particles.

Furthermore, the success of this study underscores the importance of computational approaches in protein design. By leveraging computational tools such as Rosetta, the researchers have accelerated the process of protein engineering, enabling rapid iterations and optimization.

The development of this novel protein represents a significant step forward in the ongoing battle against COVID-19. As research progresses, the integration of computational design and protein engineering holds promise for the development of innovative therapeutics with broad-spectrum antiviral capabilities. While challenges remain, this study offers hope for a future where effective treatments against emerging viral threats are within reach.

People’s everyday pleasures may improve cognitive arousal and performance

UPDATE March 4, 2024: The data set that Faghih’s lab collected for this research is now available to the global research community on the PhysioNet platform. This dataset is unique, offering real-world insights into how common pleasures affect our physiological responses and cognitive performance.

The potential of this dataset is vast. It opens new avenues for research into the influence of everyday experiences on cognitive performance, potentially leading to smarter work environments or personalized life-enhancing strategies. Imagine tailoring your work environment with specific sounds or scents to boost productivity and creativity. By analyzing this dataset, researchers can discover patterns and connections previously unseen. This could lead to breakthroughs in understanding how to harness everyday experiences to enhance cognitive abilities. Ultimately, this research could pave the way for innovative applications in workplace productivity enhancement and educational method improvement.

“This dataset is more than a collection of data points; it is a window into the intricate relationship between daily pleasures and our brain's performance,” says Fekri Azgomi, Faghih’s former PhD student who collected this data. “As our lab, the Computational Medicine Laboratory , shares this dataset with the world, we are excited about the endless possibilities it holds for advancing our understanding of the human mind and enhancing everyday life.”

Original story below.

Listening to music and drinking coffee are the sorts of everyday pleasures that can impact a person’s brain activity in ways that improve cognitive performance, including in tasks requiring concentration and memory.

That’s a finding of a new NYU Tandon School of Engineering study involving MINDWATCH, a groundbreaking brain-monitoring technology.

Developed over the past six years by NYU Tandon's Biomedical Engineering Associate Professor Rose Faghih , MINDWATCH is an algorithm that analyzes a person's brain activity from data collected via any wearable device that can monitor electrodermal activity (EDA). This activity reflects changes in electrical conductance triggered by emotional stress, linked to sweat responses.

In this recent MINDWATCH study, published in Nature Scientific Reports , subjects wearing  skin-monitoring wristbands and brain monitoring headbands completed cognitive tests while listening to music, drinking coffee and sniffing perfumes reflecting their individual preferences. They also completed those tests without any of those stimulants. 

The MINDWATCH algorithm revealed that music and coffee measurably altered subjects’ brain arousal, essentially putting them in a physiological “state of mind” that could modulate their performance in the working memory tasks they were performing. 

Specifically, MINDWATCH determined the stimulants triggered increased “beta band” brain wave activity, a state associated with peak cognitive performance. Perfume had a modest positive effect as well, suggesting the need for further study. 

“The pandemic has impacted the mental well-being of many people across the globe and now more than ever, there is a need to seamlessly monitor the negative impact of everyday stressors on one's cognitive function,” said Faghih. “Right now MINDWATCH is still under development, but our eventual goal is that it will contribute to technology that could allow any person to monitor his or her own brain cognitive arousal in real time, detecting moments of acute stress or cognitive disengagement, for example. At those times, MINDWATCH could ‘nudge’ a person towards simple and safe interventions — perhaps listening to music  — so they could get themselves into a brain state in which they feel better and perform job or school tasks more successfully.”

The specific cognitive test used in this study — a working memory task, called the n-back test — involves presenting a sequence of stimuli (in this case, images or sounds) one by one and asking the subject to indicate whether the current stimulus matches the one presented "n" items back in the sequence. This study employed a 1-back test — the participant responded "yes" when the current stimulus is the same as the one presented one item back — and a more challenging 3-back test, asking the same for three items back.

Researchers tested three types of music - energetic and relaxing music familiar to the subject, as well as novel AI-generated music that reflected the subject’s tastes.  Consistent with prior MINDWATCH research, familiar energetic music delivered bigger performance gains — as measured by reaction times and correct answers — than relaxing music. While AI-generated music produced the biggest gains among all three, further research is needed to confirm those results.

Drinking coffee led to notable but less-pronounced performance gains than music, and perfume had the most modest gains.

Performance gains under all stimulations tended to be higher on the 3-back tests, suggesting interventions may have the most profound effect when “cognitive load” is higher.

Ongoing experimentation by the MINDWATCH team will confirm the efficacy of the technology’s ability to monitor brain activity consistently, and the general success of various interventions in modulating that brain activity. Determining a category of generally successful interventions does not mean that any individual person will find it works for them.

The research was performed as a part of Faghih’s National Science Foundation CAREER award on the Multimodal Intelligent Noninvasive brain state Decoder for Wearable AdapTive Closed-loop arcHitectures (MINDWATCH) project.  The study's diverse dataset is available to researchers, allowing additional research on the use of the safe interventions in this study to modulate brain cognitive states.

Faghih served as the senior author for this paper. Its first author is Hamid Fekri Azgomi, who earned his Ph.D. under Faghih and is now a postdoctoral scholar of neurological surgery at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine.

Fekri Azgomi, H., F. Branco, L.R., Amin, M.R.  et al.  Regulation of brain cognitive states through auditory, gustatory, and olfactory stimulation with wearable monitoring.  Sci Rep   13 , 12399 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-37829-z

New York City ranks in the top 15 percent safest of more than 800 U.S. cities, according to a pioneering new analysis from researchers at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, suggesting  the effectiveness of the city’s efforts to mitigate homicides there.

In a paper published in Nature Cities , a research team explored the role that population size of cities plays on the incidences of gun homicides, gun ownership and licensed gun sellers. 

The researchers found that none of these quantities vary linearly with the population size. In other words, higher population did not directly equate to proportionally higher rates of gun homicides, ownership, or gun sellers in a predictable straight-line way across cities. The relationships were more complex than that.

This finding prompted the researchers to apply a data analytics measure called Scale-Adjusted Metropolitan Indicators (SAMIs), to filter out population effects, allow a fair comparison between cities of different sizes, and support principled analyses of the interplay between firearm violence, ownership, and accessibility.

“People often cite per capita rates of gun violence as evidence about whether gun laws work in any given metropolis — or even how safe cities are compared to each other — but that actually isn't completely accurate,” said Maurizio Porfiri , the paper’s senior author. Porfiri is Director of the NYU Tandon Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) and an Institute Professor in the Departments of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Biomedical Engineering. 

“SAMI shows us that some large cities with higher per capita rates of gun violence might actually be doing a better job of curtailing gun harms than their smaller counterparts with lower per capita rates.” 

Porfiri and Rayan Succar, a Ph.D. candidate in Mechanical Engineering and CUSP, collected and analyzed data on the amount of gun homicides and armed robberies, gun ownership, and licensed gun sellers in about 800 cities ranging in size from about 20 million (metro area) to 10,000. 

With SAMI, they uncovered that firearm homicide and robbery rates scale superlinearly, disproportionately concentrating in larger cities like NYC. 

In contrast, gun ownership scales sublinearly, with larger cities having fewer guns per capita than their smaller counterparts. Gun violence rates are higher per capita in cities with bigger populations due to the presence of causative factors there, including bigger income disparities and the proximity of people to each other. 

By studying cities' deviations from scaling laws, the researchers established rising homicide rates quantitatively cause more firearm ownership, likely due to self-protection concerns. Easier access to licensed gun sellers also directly drives up ownership, with more access in smaller cities. 

"Our research finds evidence for the theory of self-protection, wherein people will buy firearms out of fear for their own and their loved ones' lives,” said Succar.

The per capita homicide rates in New York City are significantly lower than what urban scaling laws models anticipate, considering  the city's size  and its gun ecosystem, researchers found.

"So while many people see New York as unsafe, our population-adjusted analysis makes it clear the city is doing far better on homicide prevention than you'd probably guess. In fact, it comes out on top of the country’s 10 biggest metros,” said Succar.

“Our study provides a robust quantitative basis for evaluating the effectiveness of local policies to reduce shootings,” said Porfiri. “We plan to expand this urban scaling theory and causal discovery approach globally to decode complex dynamics shaping cities worldwide.”

This study contributes to Porfiri’s ongoing data-based research related to U.S. gun prevalence and violence, which he is pursuing under a $2 million National Science Foundation grant he received in 2020 to study the “ firearm ecosystem ” in the United States. This is the first of his studies that examines data at the city level. Previous projects looked at data at the state and national level. His published research has focused on motivations of fame-seeking mass shooters ,  factors that prompt gun purchases , state-by-state gun ownership trends , and forecasting monthly gun homicide rates . 

To see the ranked lists of all cities in this study, visit Github . A summary is below:

HOMICIDE SCORES - SAMI

Highest: cities that experience higher homicide rates than what their size would predict

• Helena-West Helena, AR
• Clarksdale, MS
• Greenville, MS
• Indianola, MS
• Grenada, MS
• Blytheville, AR
• Greenwood, MS
• Pine Bluff, AR
• Bennettsville, SC

Lowest: cities that experience lower homicide rates than what their size would predict

• Mount Pleasant, MI
• Rexburg, ID
• Huntingdon, PA
• Willmar, MN
• Fremont, NE
• Dickinson, ND
• Kearney, NE
• Lincoln, IL

FIREARM OWNERSHIP SCORES - SAMI

Highest: cities that experience higher ownership rates than what their size would predict

• Natchitoches, LA 
• Bastrop, LA 
• Cleveland, MS 
• Tuscaloosa, AL 
• Statesboro, GA 
• Americus, GA 
• Brenham, TX 
• Anniston-Oxford-Jacksonville, AL 
• Albany, GA 

Lowest: cities that experience lower ownership rates than what their size would predict

• Gallup, NM 
• Kahului-Wailuku-Lahaina, HI
• Auburn, NY 
• Eagle Pass, TX 
• Ithaca, NY 
• New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA 
• Lamesa, TX 
• Freeport, IL 

LICENSED FIREARM DEALER SCORES - SAMI

Highest : cities that have more licensed dealers in them than what their size would predict

• Prineville, OR 
• Spearfish, SD 
• Fredericksburg, TX 
• Helena, MT 
• Prescott, AZ 
• Kalispell, MT 
• La Grande, OR 
• Jefferson City, MO 
• Enterprise, AL 
• Greeley, CO 

Lowest:  cities that have fewer licensed dealers in them than what their size would predict

• Raymondville, TX
• Eagle Pass, TX
• El Centro, CA
• Crescent City, CA
• New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA
• Santa Cruz-Watsonville, CA
• San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, CA
• Salinas, CA

High-profile incidents of police brutality sway public opinion more than performance of people’s local law enforcement, new study from NYU Tandon reveals

National media coverage of police brutality influences public perceptions of law enforcement more than the performance of people’s local police departments, according to data analysis from NYU Tandon School of Engineering, challenging the assumption that public confidence in police depends mostly on feeling safe from local crime.

In a study published in Communications Psychology , a NYU Tandon research team tracked media coverage of police brutality in 18 metropolitan areas in the United States — along with coverage of local crimes  — and analyzed tweets from those cities to tease out positive attitudes from negative ones towards the police. 

Led by Maurizio Porfiri , Institute Professor and Director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) , the team found when high-profile cases of police brutality make the news, negative sentiment and distrust towards police spikes across cities, even if the incident occurred in another state. 

In contrast, local media coverage of crimes in people's own cities had little sway over their views of the police. Porfiri discussed the research and its implications in a blog post . 

“Our research shows that police misconduct occurring anywhere reverberates across the country, while performance of police in their own communities contribute minimally towards attitudes around those local police departments,” said Rayan Succar , a Ph.D. candidate in Mechanical Engineering and CUSP who is the paper’s lead author. “The pattern holds steady across diverse cities.”

To reach their conclusions, researchers employed transfer entropy — an advanced statistical technique that allowed them to detect causal relationships within complex systems that change over time — in their analysis of more than 2.5 million geo-localized tweets. The approach allows for significantly more time-sensitive analysis of public sentiment than standard surveys which are constrained to the point in time at which they are fielded.

“By comparing this time series tracking shifts in sentiment to parallel time series documenting volumes of media coverage about local crime and national police brutality news, transfer entropy quantified causal relationships between media coverage and Twitter discourse about law enforcement,” said Salvador Ramallo, Fulbright Scholar from the University of Murcia in Spain and a visiting member of CUSP who is part of the research team.

The researchers assembled their data from the period October 1, 2010 to December 31, 2020. With a time resolution of one minute, the team collected tweets in each metropolitan area that contained the words “police,” “cop,” or the local police department name abbreviation of the main city in the metropolitan area (“NYPD” for New York Police Department).

In that same time frame, researchers collected coverage of police brutality and of local crime from 17 of the 20 most circulated newspapers.

To better detail the interplay between media coverage and public sentiment, the researchers also zeroed in on a two-week period around the heavily-covered George Floyd murder, a notorious example of extreme police brutality. Specifically, they scraped the Twitter feeds of the top 10 most-followed newspaper profiles and created a time series of police brutality coverage from May 29, 2020 until June 13, 2020.  

This highly resolved time series was examined in conjunction with the time series of negative tweets about the police for each of the 18 metropolitan areas during the same two-week time window.

“The research reveals how profoundly a single incident of police violence can rupture public trust in police everywhere,” said CUSP postdoctoral fellow Roni Barak Ventura, a member of the research team. “The findings suggest that to improve perceptions, police departments may need to prioritize transparency around misconduct allegations as much as local crime fighting. More community dialogue and balanced media coverage may also help build understanding between police and the public they serve.”

This study is the latest in a series that Porfiri is pursuing under a 2020 National Science Foundation grant awarded to study the “ firearm ecosystem ” in the United States. His research employs sophisticated data analytics to investigate the firearm ecosystem on three different scales. On the macroscale, research illuminates cause-and-effect relationships between firearm prevalence and firearm-related harms. On the mesoscale, the project explores the ideological, economic, and political landscape underlying state approaches to firearm safety. On the microscale, research delves into individual opinions about firearm safety.

Porfiri’s prior published research has focused on motivations of fame-seeking mass shooters ,  factors that prompt gun purchases , state-by-state gun ownership trends , and forecasting monthly gun homicide rates .  

CUSP postdoctoral fellow Rishita Das also contributed to the study.

Succar, R., Ramallo, S., Das, R.  et al.  Understanding the role of media in the formation of public sentiment towards the police.  Commun Psychol   2 , 11 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-024-00059-8

• Maurizio Porfiri

Researchers at NYU Tandon School of Engineering have revealed critical shortcomings in recently proposed methods aimed at making powerful text-to-image generative AI systems safer for public use. 

In a paper that will be presented at the Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), taking place in Vienna from May 7-11, 2024, the research team demonstrates how techniques that claim to "erase" the ability of models like Stable Diffusion to generate explicit, copyrighted, or otherwise unsafe visual content can be circumvented through simple attacks.

Stable Diffusion is a publicly available AI system that can create highly realistic images from just text descriptions.  Examples of the images generated in the study are on GitHub . 

"Text-to-image models have taken the world by storm with their ability to create virtually any visual scene from just textual descriptions," said the paper’s lead author Chinmay Hegde , associate professor in the NYU Tandon Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and in the Computer Science and Engineering Department. "But that opens the door to people making and distributing photo-realistic images that may be deeply manipulative, offensive and even illegal, including celebrity deepfakes or images that violate copyrights.”

The researchers investigated seven of the latest concept erasure methods and demonstrated how they could bypass the filters using "concept inversion" attacks. 

By learning special word embeddings and providing them as inputs, the researchers could successfully trigger Stable Diffusion to reconstruct the very concepts the sanitization aimed to remove, including hate symbols, trademarked objects, or celebrity likenesses. In fact the team's inversion attacks could reconstruct virtually any unsafe imagery the original Stable Diffusion model was capable of, despite claims the concepts were "erased."

The methods appear to be performing simple input filtering rather than truly removing unsafe knowledge representations. An adversary could potentially use these same concept inversion prompts on publicly released sanitized models to generate harmful or illegal content.

The findings raise concerns about prematurely deploying these sanitization approaches as a safety solution for powerful generative AI. 

“Rendering text-to-image generative AI models incapable of creating bad content requires altering the model training itself, rather than relying on post hoc fixes,” said Hegde. “Our work shows that it is very unlikely that, say, Brad Pitt could ever successfully request that his appearance be "forgotten" by modern AI. Once these AI models reliably learn concepts, it is virtually impossible to fully excise any one concept from them.” 

According to Hegde, the research also shows that proposed concept erasure methods must be evaluated not just on general samples, but explicitly against adversarial concept inversion attacks during the assessment process.

Collaborating with Hegde on the study were the paper’s first author, NYU Tandon PhD candidate Minh Pham; NYU Tandon PhD candidate Govin Mittal; NYU Tandon graduate fellow Kelly O. Marshall and NYU Tandon post doctoral researcher Niv Cohen.

The paper is the latest research that contributes to Hegde’s body of work focused on developing AI models to solve problems in areas like imaging, materials design, and transportation, and on identifying weaknesses in current models. In another recent study, Hegde and his collaborators revealed they developed an AI technique that can change a person's apparent age in images while maintaining their unique identifying features, a significant step forward from standard AI models that can make people look younger or older but fail to retain their individual biometric identifiers.

Circumventing Concept Erasure Methods For Text-To-Image Generative Models Minh Pham, Kelly O. Marshall, Niv Cohen, Govind Mittal, Chinmay Hegde Published: 16 Jan 2024. Conference paper at ICLR 2024

• Chinmay Hegde

Asylum seekers’ mental health benefits from sheltering in refugee centers, new study reveals

Sheltering in refugee centers can positively impact asylum seekers’ mental health, according to a new study published in Communications Medicine , underscoring the benefits of providing migrants safe and welcoming transitional environments in which professionals in the host countries monitor their psychological and physical needs. 

The study’s multidisciplinary research team, coordinated by Emanuele Caroppo — Head of International Projects and Researches at the Department of Mental Health Asl Roma 2 — administered a battery of six questionnaires, ranging from demographic surveys to comprehensive psychological assessments, to a cohort of 100 asylum-seekers in 14-day COVID-19-related quarantines in Italy between August 2020 and September 2021. 

Maurizio Porfiri , NYU Tandon Institute Professor and Director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), designed the framework for the statistical analysis and led the interpretation of the results. He and Pietro De Lellis, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at University of Naples Federico II, are the corresponding authors on the paper.

The study’s aim was to understand the impact of the first contact with the reception system on the mental health of asylum-seekers, and to delve into predictors of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among that population. 

Twenty-three percent of asylum-seekers in the study had PTSD — higher than the 4 to 10% incidence previously reported among the general global population. Pre-migration traumatic experiences were the key influencers in the the development of PTSD, including the infliction of bodily injury and torture, and witnessing violence. The study found no specific demographic factors that played a crucial role in predicting PTSD. Social ties and education levels did not emerge as salient features to predict the onset of PTSD. 

Despite the incidence of PTSD, the authors also observed that a 14-day stay in reception facilities appeared to positively impact asylum-seekers’ mental health, with the proportion of participants needing to undergo further psychological assessments decreasing from 51% to 21% throughout the quarantine period.

The study offers a significant step towards understanding the relationship between migration, mental health, and the reception environment. Asylum-seekers, who have already endured tremendous hardship, may find a glimmer of hope in the notion that a supportive and secure environment can significantly contribute to their psychological well-being.

Along with Porfiri, De Lellis and Caroppo, the study’s researchers are Carmela Calabrese, Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, University of Naples Federico II and the Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes (INS), Aix Marseille Université; Marianna Mazza, Institute of Psychiatry and Psychology, Department of Geriatrics, Neuroscience and Orthopedics, Fondazione Policlinico Universitario A. Gemelli IRCCS and Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Department of Psychiatry, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore; Alessandro Rinaldi, Migrant Health Unit, Local Health Authority Roma;  Daniele Coluzzi, Migrant Health Unit, Local Health Authority Roma; Pierangela Napoli, Migrant Health Unit, Local Health Authority Roma;  Martina Sapienza, Department of Life Sciences and Public Health, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore; and the UOC Salute Mentale Asl Roma 2 in Rome, Italy.

Caroppo, E., Calabrese, C., Mazza, M.  et al.  Migrants’ mental health recovery in Italian reception facilities.  Commun Med   3 , 162 (2023)

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Apr. 19, 2024

Tomanik group showcases palladium-catalyzed annulations, in acs catalysis.

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New York University is a private institution that was founded in 1831. It has a total undergraduate enrollment of 29,401 (fall 2022), and the setting is Urban. It utilizes a semester-based academic calendar. New York University's ranking in the 2024 edition of Best Colleges is National Universities, #35. Its tuition and fees are $60,438.

New York University’s primary campus is located in the lively Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan. NYU is a true city school, with no borders separating a distinct campus from the streets of the Big Apple. Students are guaranteed housing for all four years in the many residence halls throughout Manhattan, but many upperclassmen choose to live off campus in apartments around the city. NYU has a small but active Greek life with more than 30 fraternity and sorority chapters. There are more than 300 student organizations on campus, such as WNYU, the student radio station which streams online and broadcasts on a local FM channel to the university community.

NYU is divided into a number of schools and colleges, the largest of which is the College of Arts and Sciences. For those interested in drama or film, the renowned Tisch School of the Arts is the place to go, offering both undergraduate and graduate programs in acting, dance, dramatic writing, film, television and more. Former Tisch students include directors Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee. Other graduate programs include the highly ranked Stern School of Business ; Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development ; School of Law ; School of Medicine ; Silver School of Social Work ; and Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service .

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NYU Ranked #1 in NYC on National Science Foundation’s Research Ranking

With more than $1.27 billion in annual R&D spending, NYU jumped into the top 15 nationally, and is #7 among private universities

For the first time, NYU leads New York City universities in annual research spending according to the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) annual HERD survey.  NYU had the greatest climb in rankings among the top 50 U.S. research universities, moving up eight spots to #15 nationally and #7 among private universities.

“NYU is really proud of this achievement. Our research enterprise—across all of our schools and locations—continues its strong trajectory of growth, and thanks to the ongoing efforts of many across NYU, has proven to be a powerhouse of innovation and impact,” said Stacie Grossman Bloom, NYU’s vice provost for research and chief research officer. 

Each year, the NSF conducts the Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) survey to measure annual research spending at U.S. colleges and universities, a key measure of a university’s research performance. The latest analysis, covering fiscal year 2022, shows NYU’s research expenditures increased by 20% to exceed $1.27 billion—a sharper increase than any other U.S. institution ranked in the top 50—and marks the second year in a row that NYU has exceeded $1 billion in research spending. 

Year-over-year growth was strong for both the Grossman School of Medicine / NYU Langone (18%) and the University (24%). Funding for geosciences, atmospheric sciences, and ocean sciences research at NYU grew 83% from last year. Expenditures in math and statistics, social sciences, and engineering also all grew by more than 20%. 

Examples of notable research projects that contributed to NYU’s growth in funding include:

• The U.S. Department of Agriculture, in partnership with the Army, awarded NYU Dentistry researchers $21 million for an evidence-based program addressing family maltreatment in the military.
• NYU created the Simons Center for Computational Physical Chemistry , a multidisciplinary hub for computational physical chemistry research, with $10 million from the Simons Foundation.
• NYU Abu Dhabi researchers are studying the use of biotechnology to address non-communicable diseases as part of the Abu Dhabi Precision Medicine Virtual Research Institute , funded by $5 million from ASPIRE UAE.
• NYU Tandon researchers received $5 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop an artificial intelligence-driven augmented reality assistant .

“The NSF data demonstrate our researchers’ ability to attract significant funding from government, industry, and non-profit sources, and for that funding to spur breakthroughs in areas ranging from artificial intelligence and public health to applied social sciences, the arts, and humanities,” added Bloom. 

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Future leaders inspired at Cornell's New York Youth Institute

On March 22, the New York Youth Institute (NYYI) united ninety students from 36 high schools across New York State for an enriching day of learning at Cornell University. These bright young minds came together to share their research and innovative ideas, addressing critical global challenges and fostering a collaborative spirit in the pursuit of a more sustainable future.

The event was marked by a series of enriching activities aimed at fostering knowledge exchange, collaboration, and innovation in the field of development and global challenges.

The day commenced with a warm welcome from New York Youth Institute (NYYI), World Food Prize Foundation (WFPF), and Cornell CALS leadership, including Polly Endreny Holmberg, Abigail Turner, and CALS Dean Benjamin Houlton. The stage was then set for Francine Barchett, CALS PhD Candidate, and the WFPF Council of Advisors Youth Member.

The highlight of the day was the roundtables session, where students presented their research and engaged in discussions within small group settings. This unique opportunity for collaboration and mentorship allowed students to refine their ideas in the topics of Zero Hunger, Social Inequality, and Climate Action and gain valuable insights from roundtable expert panelists, including CALS professors, Ph.D. candidates and 2023-24 Cornell Fulbright Humphrey Fellows.

“Attending the New York Youth Institute was eye-opening,” said Daniel Kibatullin, a student from Stuyvesant High School in New York City. Kibatullin, whose project focused on sustainable agriculture in the Netherlands and the country’s reputation for innovative farming practices and efficient land use, shared that highlights included meeting fascinating people, presenting his project, and learning about new aspects of agriculture. “Overall, the experience broadened my perspective and motivated me to contribute to agricultural advancements,” Kibatullin added.

Following the engaging roundtable discussions, participants embarked on pre-selected campus tours that showcased the diverse aspects of agricultural research and innovation at Cornell University. These tours offered a unique opportunity for attendees to gain a firsthand look into various aspects of agricultural research and innovation, including Animal Agriculture, Soil Health, Food Processing and Development, Controlled Environment Agriculture, and Entomology. As participants explored the cutting-edge facilities and projects, they gained invaluable insights into potential solutions for a more sustainable future, fueling their passion for addressing global challenges and fostering a deeper understanding of the vital role innovation plays in ensuring a sustainable world.

The day concluded with a Cornell CALS and WFPF student panel discussion, featuring Anna Cummings of CALS Admissions and engaging interactions with CALS Student Ambassadors and World Food Prize Program alumni. Commissioner Richard Ball joined the event alongside WFPF-NYYI Leadership. They commended the students for their outstanding efforts and contributions throughout the day, emphasizing the importance of youth engagement in addressing global food security challenges.

 “I was inspired by the insightful proposals that highlighted the students' deep engagement with both local and global challenges, showcasing their potential to contribute to sustainable solutions,” said Uchenna Amaechina, a Humphrey Fellow from Nigeria who served as an expert panelist at the event. “Students offered innovative solutions to pressing global challenges in food security and sustainable development — from water scarcity in Sudan and sustainable agriculture through honey bee production in the Democratic Republic of Congo to food security and public health in the context of infectious diseases in India and conflicts in Somalia.

The New York Youth Institute's event at Cornell University demonstrated the power of collaboration and the potential of young minds to create positive change. By empowering students to refine their ideas and implement innovative solutions, NYYI continues to pave the way for a brighter and more sustainable future.

Maia Tsignadze is a 2023-24 Humphrey Fellow at Cornell and the founder and chairperson of the Georgian Ranger Association (GRA).

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Scientists Calculated the Energy Needed to Carry a Baby. Shocker: It’s a Lot.

In humans, the energetic cost of pregnancy is about 50,000 dietary calories — far higher than previously believed, a new study found.

By Carl Zimmer

It takes a lot of energy to grow a baby — just ask anyone who has been pregnant. But scientists are only now discovering just how much.

In a study published on Thursday in the journal Science, Australian researchers estimated that a human pregnancy demands almost 50,000 dietary calories over the course of nine months. That’s the equivalent of about 50 pints of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream, and significantly more than the researchers expected.

Previous estimates were lower because scientists generally assumed that most of the energy involved in reproduction wound up stored in the fetus, which is relatively small.

But Dustin Marshall, an evolutionary biologist at Monash University, and his students have discovered that the energy stored in a human baby’s tissues accounts for only about 4 percent of the total energy costs of pregnancy. The other 96 percent is extra fuel required by a woman’s own body.

“The baby itself becomes a rounding error,” Dr. Marshall said. “It took us a while to wrap our heads around that.”

This discovery emerged from Dr. Marshall’s long-running research on metabolism. Different species have to meet different demands for energy. Warm-blooded mammals, for example, can maintain a steady body temperature and stay active even when the temperature drops.

But being warm-blooded also has drawbacks. Maintaining a high metabolic rate requires mammals to constantly feed the furnace. A coldblooded snake, in contrast, can go weeks between meals .

Dr. Marshall set out to compile a complete inventory of the energy consumed by dozens of species over the course of their lives. He recognized that most females must not only fuel their own bodies, but must also put additional energy into their offspring.

When Dr. Marshall began looking into the costs of reproduction, he couldn’t find solid numbers. Some researchers had guessed that indirect costs — that is, the energy females use to fuel their own bodies while pregnant — might come to only 20 percent of the direct energy in the baby’s tissues. But Dr. Marshall didn’t trust their speculation.

He and his students set out to estimate the costs for themselves. They scoured the scientific literature for information such as the energy stored in each offspring’s tissues. They also looked for the overall metabolic rate of females while they were reproducing, which scientists can estimate by measuring how much oxygen the mothers consume.

“Folks were just poodling along, collecting their data on their species, but no one was putting it together,” Dr. Marshall said.

By aggregating such data, the researchers estimated the costs of reproduction for 81 species, from insects to snakes to goats.

They found that the size of an animal has a big influence on how much energy it needs to reproduce. Microscopic animals called rotifers, for example, require less than a millionth of a calorie to make one offspring. By contrast, a white-tailed deer doe needs more than 112,000 calories to produce a fawn.

The metabolism of a species also plays a part. Warm-blooded mammals use three times the energy that reptiles and other coldblooded animals of the same size do.

The biggest surprise came when Dr. Marshall and his students found that in many species, the indirect costs of pregnancy were greater than the direct ones.

The most extreme results came from mammals. On average, only 10 percent of the energy a female mammal used during pregnancy went into its offspring.

“It shocked me,” Dr. Marshall said. “We went back to the sources many times because it seemed astonishingly high based on the expectation from theory.”

David Reznick, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved in the study, was also startled at how high the indirect cost could get. “I wouldn’t have guessed that,” he said.

And yet what surprised him even more was that Dr. Marshall’s team was the first to pin down these numbers. “It is disarming,” he said. “You think, someone has done this before.”

The study offers clues about why some species have higher indirect costs than others. Snakes that lay eggs use much less indirect energy than snakes that give birth to live young. The live-bearing snakes have to support embryos as they grow inside their bodies, whereas egg-laying mothers can get their offspring out of their bodies faster.

There may be a number of reasons that mammals pay such high indirect costs for being pregnant. Many species build a placenta to transfer nutrients to their embryos, for example. Dr. Marshall suspects that humans pay a particularly high cost because women stay pregnant longer than most other mammals do.

Dr. Marshall said that the new results may also explain why female mammals put so much effort into caring for their young after they’re born: because they put in so much effort during pregnancy.

“They’ve already got massive sunk costs in the project,” Dr. Marshall said.

Carl Zimmer covers news about science for The Times and writes the Origins column . More about Carl Zimmer

Pregnancy, Childbirth and Postpartum Experiences

Aspirin’s Benefits: Not enough pregnant women at risk of developing pre-eclampsia, life-threatening high blood pressure, know that low-dose aspirin can help lower that risk. Leading experts are hoping  to change that.

‘A Chance to Live’: Cases of trisomy 18 may rise as many states restrict abortion. Some women have chosen to have these babies , love them tenderly and care for them devotedly.

Teen Pregnancies: A large study in Canada found that women who were pregnant as teenagers were more likely to die before turning 31 .

Weight-Loss Drugs: Doctors say they are seeing more women try weight-loss medications in the hopes of having a healthy pregnancy. But little is known about the impact of those drugs  on a fetus.

Premature Births: After years of steady decline, premature births rose sharply in the United States  between 2014 and 2022. Experts said the shift might be partly the result of a growing prevalence of health complications among mothers .

Depression and Suicide: Women who experience depression during pregnancy or in the year after giving birth have a greater risk of suicide and attempted suicide .

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New research initiative tackles pressing global development issues

By alison fromme cornell sc johnson college of business.

Fundamental challenges in food insecurity, poverty, agriculture, health, education and markets form the focus of Collaboration for International Development Economics Research (CIDER) , a new initiative launched by the Office of the Provost, the SC Johnson College of Business, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the College of Arts and Sciences and the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Policy.

“CIDER builds on a long history of Cornell research and engagement in the economies of nations, particularly developing and emerging economies challenged by global economic forces,” said Provost Michael I. Kotlikoff. “This initiative expands the interdisciplinary focus of these efforts, bringing economists, social scientists, policy experts and agricultural experts together to pursue solutions to some of our most difficult global challenges.”

Hosted by the SC Johnson College, CIDER unites 24 faculty across campus and the world, along with students, staff, researchers and external partners, to create and share knowledge. CIDER’s activities will encompass research, workshops, seminars, internships, career mentoring and continuing-education coursework.

“We’re delighted to embark on this new collaborative effort in development economics,” said Andrew Karolyi, the Charles Field Knight Dean of the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. “CIDER taps into existing expertise and a grand legacy of intellectual leadership at Cornell going back decades. I can’t wait to see the tangible impact CIDER makes on campus and around the world.”

CIDER’s inaugural faculty director is Chris Barrett , the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management and professor in the Brooks School.

“We expect CIDER will further reinforce Cornell's already formidable reputation in this space,” Barrett said. The university’s impact in development economics was established over many decades and reinforced when standard measures of poverty and food insecurity were developed here in the 1980s. Now, CIDER provides a forum to collaborate on large-scale projects, advance policy-relevant research and train early career scholars and practitioners.

Through a workshop hosted by CIDER on May 10, the center is already encouraging new collaborations in East African dryland drought research, risk management and policy.

The World Bank, the African Development Bank, private organizations and multiple East African national governments are currently investing nearly $1 billion in the region to address drought, Barrett said.

“The efficacy and the impact of these massive investments can be directly influenced by research findings,” he said. “Indeed, research by Cornell and partners going back to the late 2000s underpins the initiative. We’re now working to produce timely policy-relevant, clearly communicated and rigorous research that can inform that effort.”

Among other presentations at the workshop, Karlijn Morsink , Utrecht University economist and CIDER-affiliated adjunct associate professor at the Dyson School, discussed her work leading the evaluation of World Bank programs in the region and share opportunities for Cornell faculty and student involvement.

“This workshop and the collaborations it represents offer just one example,” Barrett said. “We look to scale this type of effort across a range of different domains.”

CIDER will also support early career mentoring through two formal programs. Structural Transformation of Agriculture and Rural Spaces (STARS) , an existing Cornell program, previously paired early career researchers who earned degrees in Africa with mentors at Cornell and affiliated institutions. Now under CIDER’s umbrella, STARS is open to scholars across all low- and lower-middle-income countries.

Additionally, a predoctoral program for scholars who have not yet earned advanced degrees will provide one to three years of research experience and professional development training with core faculty. One predoctoral fellow already began work in January, and three more arrive this summer.

Building professional networks, increasing research capacity, disseminating best practices in the field and shaping early career researchers for the next generation are at the heart of CIDER’s mission, Barrett said. “This is a really exciting venture.”

Alison Fromme is a writer for the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business.

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