2021 Table of Contents
Urban Research Day 2021 Agenda 3
NYU Faculty Presentation Groups 4
Opening Speakers 6
Faculty Presenters 7
Doctoral Presenters 29
Urban Initiative Co-Directors 35
Faculty Advisory Committee 37
2020-21 Urban Doctoral Fellows 41
Resources 46
2 NYU Faculty Urban Research Day Friday, March 5, 2021
Goal: To convene faculty from across NYU to present concise summaries of their urban-related research as a way to share knowledge and increase scholarly collaboration
Agenda:
12:30 – 12:35pm Welcome Cybele Raver, Deputy Provost, NYU
12:35 – 12:40pm Opening Remarks Sherry Glied, Dean, NYU Wagner
12:40 – 12:45pm Transition to Round 1
12:45 – 1:45pm Session 1 / 1B: Presentations + Panel Discussion
1:45 – 2:00pm Break
2:00 – 3:00pm Session 2: Presentations + Panel Discussion
3:00 – 4:00pm Session 3: Presentations + Panel Discussion
3 NYU Faculty Presentation Groups
Session 1 and 1B (12:45- 1:45pm)
Group Health Environment and Sustainability
Zoom Link Link to Panel Link to Panel
Moderator Jo Ivey Bouffard Andrea Silverman
Presenters Constantine Kontokosta Andrea Silverman
Emily Goldmann Charlie Mydlarz
Filippa Juul Elizabeth Henaff
Niyati Parekh Kevin Cromar
Shlomo (Solly) Angel Rae Zimmerman
Tae Hong Park
Session 2 (2:00-3:00pm)
Group Safety, Education, and Resilience
Zoom Link Link to Panel
Moderator Thomas Sugrue
Presenters Debra Laefer
Ingrid Gould Ellen
Maurizio Porfiri
Rachel M. Abenavoli
Rajeev Dehejia
4 Session 3 (3:00-4:00pm)
Group Urban Design, Planning & Governance
Zoom Link Link to Panel
Moderator Shlomo Angel
Presenters Neil Klieman & Alex Shermansong
Blagovesta Momchedjikova
Jon Ritter
Julia Payson
Victoria Alsina
5 Opening Speakers
Cybele Raver Deputy Provost, Professor of Applied Psychology Cybele Raver serves as Deputy Provost for NYU. She also maintains an active program of research, examining the mechanisms that support children's self- regulation in the contexts of poverty and social policy. Raver and her research team currently conduct CSRP, a federally-funded RCT intervention and she regularly advises local and federal government agencies and foundations on promoting school readiness among low-income children. See our new articles in American Psychologist downloadable from the list, below. Raver has received several prestigious awards from organizations such as the American Psychological Association and the William T. Grant Foundation as well as support from the Spencer Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation.
Sherry Glied Dean, Professor of Public Service, Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service
In 2013, Sherry Glied was named Dean of New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. From 1989-2013, she was Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. She was Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management from 1998-2009. On June 22, 2010, Glied was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services and served in that capacity from July 2010 through August 2012. She had previously served as Senior Economist for health care and labor market policy on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in 1992-1993, under Presidents Bush and Clinton, and participated in the Clinton Health Care Task Force. She has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Social Insurance, and served as a member of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking. Glied’s principal areas of research are in health policy reform and mental health care policy.
6 Faculty Presenters
Rachel M. Abenavoli
Steinhardt; Institute of Human Development and Social Change
Rachel Abenavoli is a Research Assistant Professor of Applied Psychology at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Her research intersects developmental, education, and prevention sciences and examines the contexts, programs, and practices that drive children’s social-emotional and behavioral development, particularly across the transition to school. An overarching goal of her work is to identify and strengthen approaches with potential for scale and sustained impact. Guided by this aim, Dr. Abenavoli focuses on school systems as powerful levers for change, teachers as central agents and targets of intervention, and research-practice partnerships as a promising way to generate relevant, rigorous, and actionable evidence. For the last four years, Dr. Abenavoli has been engaged in a partnership with the NYC Department of Education Division of Early Childhood Education to use data and research to strengthen implementation of the city’s universal pre-K initiative, Pre-K for All. Dr. Abenavoli was an Institute of Education Sciences (IES) Predoctoral Fellow and holds a Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Studies from Pennsylvania State University.
Research Descripition: Since 2014, researchers at NYU Steinhardt and district leaders in the NYC Department of Education’s Division of Early Childhood Education (DECE) have been engaged in a robust research-practice partnership to support and strengthen NYC’s universal pre-K program, Pre-K for All. We are currently launching a mixed- methods study with our district partners to better understand the challenges and stressors facing pre-K program leaders, teachers, and families—as well as the resilience, creativity, and innovation they are demonstrating—in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study also examines how these experiences vary across NYC neighborhoods, programs, and individuals, with implications for supporting program quality and advancing equity across the Pre-K for All system. Our NYU-DECE partnership is well positioned to gather critical information about the challenges facing pre-K programs and families and effective approaches that hold the greatest promise for supporting families during future disasters, as well.
7 Victoria Alsina
CUSP, The Govlab
Victòria Alsina Burgués is an Industry Assistant Professor and Academic Director at the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress. She holds a B.A. in Political Science and Public Administration from Universitat Pompeu Fabra; an MPA from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; an M.A. in Public Leadership from ESADE Business School; and a Ph.D. in Political and Social Sciences from Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
Research Description: Alsina’s current research and teaching focus on finding innovative solutions to rethink public institutions, exploring how collaborative governance and public engagement can change the way we govern, solving some of society’s most pressing problems at the intersection of the public and private sectors and helping communities and institutions to work together to solve public problems more effectively and legitimately.
8 Shlomo (Solly) Angel
Marron Institute
Shlomo (Solly) Angel is a Professor of City Planning and the Director of the Urban Expansion Program at the Marron Institute of Urban Management at New York University. He is the author of Planet of Cities (2012) and Housing Policy Matters (2000), the leading author of the Atlas of Urban Expansion—2016 Edition, and co- author of A Pattern Language (1977). Since 2012, he led teams assisting intermediate cities in Colombia and Ethiopia in preparing for their rapid expansion. Dr. Angel holds an architecture degree and a doctorate in City and Regional Planning from the University of California at Berkeley.
Research Description: The findings introduced in this longitudinal study of cumulative Covid-19 cases and deaths are based on reported data for 384 U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) for 20 weeks, starting on 6 March 2020 and ending on 23 July 2020. We look at the variation in the 7-day averages of the cumulative numbers of reported cases and deaths in each city at the end of every week as a function of its total population, its ‘urbanized area,’ and its average population density (the ratio of its population and its urbanized area). We find that during the last 10 weeks, the numbers have tended to converge: (1) a city with double the population of a smaller one can be expected to have 17% more cases per capita and 28% more deaths per capita than the smaller city; (2) a city with double the urbanized area of a smaller one can be expected to have 19% more cases per capita and 38% more deaths per capita than the smaller city; and, finally, (3) a city with double the population density of a smaller one can be expected to have 4.1% fewer cases per capita and 7.4% fewer deaths per capita than the smaller city. Larger cities have more than their share of cases and deaths in part because the larger the city, the larger the number of possible interactions among its inhabitants. And it is this larger number, rather than the overall average proximity of people to each other—expressed by the average density in the city—that accounts for that larger share. In fact, when it pertains to Covid-19 cases and deaths, denser metropolitan areas appear to be better able to contain their numbers than more spread out ones.
9 Kevin Cromar
Marron Institute of Urban Management, Grossman School of Medicine
Kevin Cromar, Ph.D., is a program director at the Marron Institute of Urban Management and an Associate Professor of Environmental Medicine and Population Health at New York University Grossman School of Medicine. His research program works at the intersection of scientific research and public policy in order to generate the knowledge needed to improve health and quality of life.
Research Description: Adverse health impacts associated with environmental risks in metropolitan areas are often underestimated, or poorly understood, due to incomplete spatial and temporal environmental monitoring information. Recognizing these shortcomings can improve the management of these environmental risks at the local level. Cromar will present three policy-relevant examples from his research showing how addressing the exposure assessment limitations in metropolitan areas results in better estimates of the health impacts of ambient pollutants, improved identification of susceptible sub-populations, and increased capacity to quantify regional wildland fire contributions to environmental exposures at the local level.
10 Rajeev Dehejia
Wagner
Rajeev Dehejia is Professor of Economics and Public Policy and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, New York University. He is Professor Economics, by courtesy, in the Department of Economics, New York University. He is Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Research Network Fellow at CESifo, and Research Fellow at IZA, Bonn. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1997. Previous appointments include Columbia, Toronto, and Tufts, and visiting positions include Harvard, Princeton, and the London School of Economics. His research interests include: applied econometrics (external validity in experimental and quasi-experimental methods, propensity score and matching methods, and Bayesian applied econometrics), development economics (child labor, microcredit, and financial development and growth), labor economics (labor supply, financial incentives and fertility decisions, labor standards), and public economics (religion and consumption insurance). Previous editorial positions include the Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, the Journal of Human Resources, and the Journal of the American Statistical Association.
Research Description: This paper examines the roles that information and preferences play in determining whether households choose schools with high value added. We study Romanian school markets using administrative data, a survey, and an experiment. The administrative data show that, on average, households could select schools with 1 s.d. worth of additional value added. This may reflect that households have incorrect beliefs about schools’ value added, or that their preferences lead them to prioritize other school traits. We elicit households’ beliefs and find that they explain less than a fifth of the variation in value added. We then inform randomly selected households about the value added of the schools in their towns. This improves the accuracy of households’ beliefs and leads low-achieving students to attend higher-value added schools. We next estimate households’ preferences and predict their choices under the counterfactual of fully accurate beliefs. We find that beliefs account for 18 (11) percent of the value added that households with low- (high-) achieving children leave unexploited. Interestingly, for households with low-achieving children, the experiment seems to have affected both beliefs and preferences. This generates larger effects on choices than would be predicted via impacts on beliefs alone.
11 Ingrid Ellen
Wagner, Furman Center
Ingrid Gould Ellen is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at NYU Wagner and a Faculty Director at the NYU Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. Professor Ellen's research interests center on housing and urban policy. She is author of Sharing America's Neighborhoods: The Prospects for Stable Racial Integration (Harvard University Press, 2000) and more recently editor of The Dream Revisited: Contemporary Debates About Housing, Segregation and Opportunity (Columbia University Press, 2019). She has written numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters related to housing policy, community development, and school and neighborhood segregation. Professor Ellen has held visiting positions at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. She attended Harvard University, where she received a bachelor's degree in applied mathematics, an M.P.P., and a Ph.D. in public policy.
Research Description: Moves into new, subsidized rental homes may improve family well-being in a variety of ways. Such moves are likely to increase disposable income, improve housing conditions, enhance residential stability, and potentially provide access to higher opportunity neighborhoods and schools. In so doing, these moves may improve children's educational outcomes. Using data from New York City, the nation's largest school district, we examine whether—and to what extent—moving into new, subsidized rental housing units improves educational outcomes for low-income students. We exploit the fact that New York City allocates its new subsidized housing units through lotteries that are very over-subscribed. We match school‐age children to longitudinal public school records and estimate the impact of moves into subsidized housing on academic performance through a comparison of students’ performance on standardized tests before and after moving into subsidized housing. We exploit the conditionally random timing of move-ins due to the lottery to estimate a causal model.
12 Emily Goldmann
School of Global Public Health
Emily Goldmann is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the School of Global Public Health. She holds a BA in Economics from Columbia University and an MPH and PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Michigan. Trained as a psychiatric and social epidemiologist, Dr Goldmann's research focuses on the social determinants of common mental disorders, behavioral health surveillance, and physical-mental health comorbidity. She is also interested in the development of pedagogical approaches for teaching epidemiology to diverse audiences. Previous work has centered on the role of neighborhoods and psychosocial factors in posttraumatic stress disorder in urban areas, as well as the mental health consequences of disasters and other traumatic events. Prior to joining NYU, Dr. Goldmann conducted health economics outcomes research and worked as an epidemiologist at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, where she conducted behavioral health surveillance among New Yorkers.
Research Description: My current research focuses on mental health in the context of the current COVID-19 pandemic. I led a recent population-based survey of five cities in the Southern U.S. to examine mental health and the experience of COVID-19 related stressors -- including discrimination, economic strain, being an essential worker -- among marginalized racial/ethnic groups in these understudied urban areas. We are currently working on several papers that evaluate: (1) racial/ethnic differences in mental health, (2) COVID-related discrimination experience and mental health, (3) economic strain and mental health, and (4) common coping behaviors.
13 Elizabeth Henaff
Tandon, CUSP
She earned an International Baccalaureate with honors in 1999 from Lycée Jeanne d’Albret, in France, and then entered the University of Texas, in Austin, where she earned a B.S. in Computer Science (2005) and an M.A. in Plant Biology (2008). In 2013 she earned her Ph.D., cum laude, in Bioinformatics, from the University of Barcelona.
At the center of her research is a fascination with the way living beings interact with their environment. This inquiry has produced a body of work that ranges from scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals, to projects with landscape architects, to artistic practice. She has made contributions to understanding how plants respond to the force of gravity, how genome structure changes in response to stress, and most recently has turned her attention to the ubiquitous and invisible microbial component of our environment.
Research Description: At the Laboratory for Living Interfaces we study the interaction of organisms and their environment through scientific and design enquiries. Through experimental practice, we aim to understand how the design decisions of architects, city planners, and material scientists affect the ubiquitous living component of the spaces we inhabit: the environmental microbiome.
14 Filippa Juul
School of Global Public Health
I am a NYU Provost's Postdoctoral Fellow/Research Assistant Professor at the Department of Public Health Policy and Management at the NYU School of Global Public Health. I am a nutrition and chronic disease epidemiologist and my work broadly focuses on the impact of nutritional factors on chronic diseases. I completed a Bachelor’s degree in Nutrition and Dietetics at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain, pursued a Master’s degree in Public Health Nutrition at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, and obtained a PhD in Epidemiology at the NYU School of Global Public Health. Prior to joining NYU, I worked as a researcher at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, where my work focused on obesity epidemiology. I also have practical experience of working with public health initiatives, including obesity prevention among young children.
Research Description: As a nutrition and chronic disease epidemiologist, my research primarily focuses on elucidating the influence of diet in the development of obesity and cardiovascular disease. My work also involve implementation and policy research, with the goal to translate the findings of my epidemiological investigations into effective public health measures for cardiovascular disease prevention, with a specific focus on reducing health disparities. My research to date has used data from large US population studies (the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, the FoodAPS National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey, and the Framingham Heart study) to investigate dietary patterns in relation to diet quality, obesity and cardiovascular health. My current research projects involve (1) determining the role of ultra-processed food consumption in racial/ethnic disparities in diet quality and cardiovascular risk factors in the US; and (2) evaluating recently implemented policies targeting ultra-processed foods to prevent obesity in Chile, Brazil and Ecuador.
15 Neil Kleiman Wagner, CUSP Neil Kleiman has spent 25 years building a career at the intersection of policy, philanthropy, government and academia. He founded an urban issues think tank, established new university degree programs, and developed innovative and practical policy solutions for dozens of cities across the United States. He has also written and edited over thirty policy reports, with his work featured in many media outlets, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chronicle of Higher Education, PBS NewsHour and National Public Radio. Kleiman holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In addition to teaching at NYU, he has also taught urban policy at Barnard College, John Jay College-CUNY, Tulane, Universidad de los Andes (Bogota) and has been a visiting fellow at Williams College. Research Description: When the focus is government innovation, culture is the elephant in the room. One of the greatest factors for success for any organization in any sector, culture is rarely discussed in concrete terms -- especially at city hall. We are hoping to change that with a new research paper and guidebook for U.S. mayors and city managers. The project grows out of hundreds of conversations we've had with city leaders focused on culture change and a comprehensive case review of three cities— Louisville, Somerville and Kansas City—to draw general lessons for city executives to understand what organizational culture is, why understanding culture is key for delivering for citizens, and practical steps to reshape municipal culture to boost performance.
16 Constantine Kontokosta
Marron Institute, CUSP
Constantine E. Kontokosta is an Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning and Director of the Civic Analytics program at the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management. He also directs the Urban Intelligence Lab and is associated faculty at the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) and the Department of Civil and Urban Engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Previously, he served as the inaugural CUSP Deputy Director and Assistant Professor of Urban Informatics at CUSP and Tandon. At CUSP, he was part of the Center’s founding leadership team and designed and launched one of the first graduate programs in urban science and informatics. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for his research in urban informatics for sustainable cities, and was recently awarded grants from NSF to study data bias and fairness in city predictive analytics and to develop computational models for COVID-19 exposure risk and disease spread. He holds a Ph.D., M.Phil., and M.S. from Columbia University, where he received the HUD Doctoral Dissertation Award and the Lincoln Institute’s C. Lowell Harriss Fellowship, a M.S. from New York University, and a B.S.E. from the University of Pennsylvania.
Research Description: We present a computational approach to measure exposure density at high spatial and temporal resolution to understand neighborhood disparities in transmission risk of COVID-19. By integrating geolocation data and granular land use information, we are able to establish both the extent of activity in a particular neighborhood and the nature of that activity across residential, non-residential, and outdoor activities. We then analyze the differential behavioral response to social distancing policies based on local risk factors, built environment characteristics, and socioeconomic inequality. Our results highlight the significant disparities in health outcomes for racial and ethnic minorities and lower income households. Exposure density provides an additional metric to further explain and understand the disparate impact of COVID-19 on vulnerable communities and provides the basis for other behavioral studies in urban policy and planning.
17 Debra Laefer
Tandon, CUSP
With degrees from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, NYU, and Columbia University, Prof. Debra Laefer has a wide- ranging background spanning from geotechnical and structural engineering to art history and historic preservation. Not surprisingly, Prof. Laefer’s work often stands at the crossroads of technology creation and community values such as devising technical solutions for protecting architecturally significant buildings from sub-surface construction. As the density of her aerial remote sensing datasets continues to grow exponentially with time, Prof. Laefer and her Urban Modeling Group must help pioneer computationally efficient storage, querying, and visualization strategies that both harness distributed computing-based solutions and bridge the gap between data availability and its usability for the engineering community. Her current research interests focus on subsurface data integration with high-density laser scanning, hyperspectral imagery, and historical data about the above and below-ground built environment and its forgotten remnants as a way to both understand urban spaces and to manage them.
A major focus of my work is in subsurface documentation, integration, and storage. This is of particular concern with respect to natural disasters and their increasing threats to urban populations. The distributed nature of a city’s infrastructure means that utilities and transportation systems in one neighborhood may have direct and/or cascading effects in others. Better understanding of semi-regional, as well as local, interdependencies and vulnerabilities is critical to creating resilient communities. Presently, this does not occur in a systematic way. Unlike the aboveground, subsurface data are not publicly accessible in an interoperable format and typically held in individual systems and in incompatible or non-computer readable formats. To directly address this, my group is piloting the subsurface data synthesis for two New York City communities (i.e. Sunset Park in Brooklyn and Midtown East in Manhattan). This is being done with the participation of more than two dozen local stakeholders.
18 Blagovesta Momchedjikova Expository Writing Program, Tisch School of the Arts Blagovesta Momchedjikova (PhD in Performance Studies, NYU), specializes in panstereoramas, memory, and all things urban. She teaches writing, art, and the city at New York University. She is the editor of Captured by the City: Perspectives in Urban Culture Studies (2013) and Streetnotes: Urban Feel (2010), as well as co- editor of Sounds of the City (2021, post- production); From Above: The Practice of Verticality (2019); The Panorama Handbook: Thoughts and Visions On and Around the Queens Museum Panorama of the City of New York (2018); and Public Space: Between Spectacle and Resistance (2016). Her urban-inspired poetry and prose appear in various publications. She chairs the Urban Culture Area for MAPACA and the Conference Scientific Committee for the International Panorama Council; and sits on the editorial boards of Streetnotes and the International Panorama Council Journal. Panstereoramas and Urban Parks: A Comparative Study of Amusement
Panstereoramas, or miniatures, are a convenient way of representing multiple 3D structures in a dispersed manner, such as in a specifically landscaped urban park. The number of outdoor miniature parks in urban environments is growing; one database reports close to 100, concentrated mostly in Europe (the UK) and North America (the USA). Evidently, visitors enjoy the opportunity to see more structures (often from distant areas) for less money and time at such environments, where miniaturization is the main attraction. Yet miniature parks, like many carefully crafted attractions, embody and perpetuate certain utopian narratives—say, of unity, peace, and understanding— while monitoring leisure. Using examples from several miniature parks, including Mini Europe (Brussels, Belgium), Miniaturk (Istanbul, Turkey), and Mini Bulgaria Park (Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria), I reflect on whether miniature parks, despite being a beloved form of “safe,” family-friendly entertainment in the urban jungle, function as tools of social control. A comprehensive list of existing miniature parks, based upon my original research and fieldwork, is available upon request.
19 Charlie Mydlarz
CUSP
Charlie Mydlarz is a Senior Research Scientist and Research Assistant Professor at NYU CUSP and the Music and Audio Research Laboratory. He is an acoustician/engineer who designs, develops, and deploys IoT devices to tackle different challenges, including: urban noise sensing, acoustic condition monitoring, urban flood detection, soundscape perception, building/classroom efficiency, and urban mobility.
Research Description: Of the myriad impacts that are predicted to accompany climate change, flooding is expected to have an out-sized influence on public health, infrastructure, and mobility in urban areas. In New York City, for example, sea level rise and an increase in the occurrence of high intensity rain storms (which convey large volumes of water to drains, leading to backups and overflows) have led to a dramatic increase in flood risk, particularly in low-lying and coastal neighborhoods. The physical presence of standing water on streets and sidewalks can impede mobility and restrict access to transportation. Additionally, urban flood water contains a diverse array of contaminants, including industrial and household chemicals, fuels, and sewage. Access to real-time information on flooding can improve resiliency and efficiency by allowing residents to identify navigable transportation routes and make informed decisions to avoid exposure to floodwater contaminants. One of the goals of the Flood Sense project is to develop a flood sensor that overcomes common sensor challenges, as well as the digital infrastructure necessary to log, process, and present the data in combination with other publicly available information, such as rainfall data, 311 flooding complaints, and social media feeds.
20 Niyati Parekh School of Global Public Health, Grossman School of Medicine, Rory Meyers College of Nursing I am an internationally recognized nutritional epidemiologist. My research and teaching are motivated by a deep commitment to reduce nutrition-related disease outcomes in at-risk groups. I have built a robust research portfolio that examines the intersection of biological and behavioral factors of non-communicable diseases in US populations, using landmark datasets. The overarching theme of my research agenda is to examine the role of nutrition and diet-related factors in the etiology of non-communicable diseases, with a particular focus on cancer, obesity and metabolic dysregulation. My multidisciplinary research integrates intricacies from many distinct areas of expertise: disease biology, nutritional biochemistry, epidemiology and biostatistics. I received my MS in Nutrition and Dietetics from the University of Mumbai, my PhD from University of Wisconsin-Madison and postdoctoral fellowship from Rutgers-Cancer Institute of NJ. I joined NYU Steinhardt’s Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health in January 2008, as Assistant Professor of Public Health Nutrition. In 2015, I transitioned to NYU’s School of Global Public Health (GPH), as Associate Professor with an affiliated appointment at NYU’s Department of Population Health-Grossman School of Medicine. I currently serve as Executive Director of Doctoral Programs. Research Description: My research addresses commercial determinants of health and focuses on a highly processed industrial foods (including alcohol) and non- communicable diseases. Industrial foods are major determinants of non-communicable diseases, they are cheap, omnipresent in our food system and aggressively marketed to vulnerable populations, exacerbating food insecurity in these subpopulations. My presentation will summarize the extensive problem of ultra-processed foods, refined sugars and its consequences with regards to non-communicable diseases and food insecurity, both of which are pressing public health challenges but also important in the context of COVID-19.
21 Tae Hong Park
Steinhardt, Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions
Tae Hong Park received his PhD, MFA, MA, and Eng. degrees from Princeton Univ., Dartmouth College, and Korea University. Early on, his research centered on AI focus on exploring automatic musical instrument classification using neural networks. Prior returning to academia to pursue graduate studies, he was an Associate Research Engineer at the LG Central Research Lab in Seoul, Korea. His work has been sponsored by organizations and companies such as IBM, Google, CUSP, and Nabi (SK Telecom) resulting in over 90 publications and patents. Dr. Park is author of Introduction to DSP: Computer Musically Speaking; serves as President of the International Computer Music Association; co-founder and CTO of GetNoisy; and also wears the hat of a musician having played at Carnegie Hall and on Korean music television.
Research Description: Citygram is a project started in 2011 that aims to create real-time soundmaps through a 3D - Data-Driven, Community-Driven, and Art-Driven - initiative. Citygram addresses the sensor network scaling conundrum that is necessary for creating rich soundmaps through a socio-technological solution where any device that runs a web-browser can be turned into a high quality noise sensor node. Additionally, Citygram's "sticker sensor" facilitates sensor installation thus making community participation practicable, while high level data, collected via an "AI filter", enables exponential data compression necessary in archiving spatial sound over the vastness of space and time. We also actively engage in producing soundscape data-driven art events to disseminate research outputs to the public and to bring awareness to the modern urban noise pollution phenomenon.
22 Julia Payson
Department of Politics
Julia Payson is an Assistant Professor of Politics at New York University. She studies representation, accountability, and public service provision in state and local governments in the U.S. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford in 2017, and she is currently a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University. Her research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, and her published work has appeared in Legislative Studies Quarterly, The Journal of Politics, and The American Political Science Review.
Research Description: How did Progressive era reforms affect the economic fortunes and upward mobility of immigrant communities in U.S. cities? The historical record is unclear. Some scholars point out that reformers often sought to improve urban living and working conditions and expand access to education, which generated new opportunities for economic advancement for immigrants. Others argue that many of the progressive reforms adopted by cities were explicitly designed to reduce the political power and participation of non-native residents. We take advantage of deanonymized census data from 1900 to 1940 to contribute to this debate by examining how economic conditions evolved over time for immigrant communities across 1,100 U.S. cities. After documenting how immigrants fared in terms of their wages and occupations in each decade in cities that adopted different types of institutional reforms at different times, we implement a linking procedure that allows us to compare outcomes for fathers and sons within the same family. This approach provides the most comprehensive account to date of whether and how municipal institutions matter for social and economic inequality.
23 Maurizio Porfiri
Tandon, CUSP
Dr. Maurizio Porfiri is an Institute Professor at New York University Tandon School of Engineering, with appointments at the Center for Urban Science and Progress and the Departments of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Civil and Urban Engineering. He received M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Engineering Mechanics from Virginia Tech, in 2000 and 2006; a “Laurea” in Electrical Engineering (with honors) and a Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” and the University of Toulon (dual degree program), in 2001 and 2005, respectively. He has been on the faculty of the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department since 2006, when he founded the Dynamical Systems Laboratory.
Research Description: We are experiencing an unprecedented surge of mass shooting events in the U.S. These events often elicit heated discussion among the public, polarizing opinions on firearm control, as seen and amplified in the media. We present an information-theoretic framework, which goes beyond correlational analysis to unravel causal links between mass shootings, media coverage, and firearm prevalence. We demonstrate directional information transfer between the time-series of media coverage and the number of background checks, suggesting that media coverage may increase public fear of more stringent firearm control and, in turn, drive firearm prevalence. People might rush to buy guns because they fear that new regulations may come into effect and their right to acquire a weapon be challenged. This research, published in Nature Human Behavior and Patterns, constitutes the basis of a new CUSP initiative supported by the National Science Foundation to elucidate and engineer the firearm ecosystem in the U.S.
24 Jon Ritter
FAS Department of Art History, Urban Design and Architecture Studies
Jon Ritter is Clinical Associate Professor in the NYU Department of Art History, Urban Design and Architecture Studies. He earned his Ph.D. in architectural history from the NYU Institute of Fine Arts in 2007. His research and teaching focus on the origins of urban planning in the U.S. and Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Professor Ritter is currently president of the New York chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians, and he co-directs the NYUs London-based M.A. in Historical and Sustainable Architecture.
Research Description: This research investigates the history and legacy of excess condemnation as an eminent domain strategy for planning and financing improvements in American cities during the early 20th century. The few historians who have studied excess condemnation in the Progressive Era argue that reformers proposed it to achieve aesthetic reform rather than to recoup the “unearned increment” accruing to private interests from public improvements. This paper reassesses this conclusion, identifying redistributive motives among reformers, while also taking Progressive aesthetic objectives seriously as public goods. Analysis reviews the arguments and legal basis for excess condemnation, examining several New York City projects to identify Progressive aspirations for excess condemnation. Evidence is drawn from primary documents, contemporary reporting, and archival sources. Photographs, architectural plans and site maps inform conclusions about both the early 20th century approach to urban development and the later history of these sites under urban renewal and in public use today.
25 Andrea Silverman
Tandon, CUSP, School of Global Public Health
Andrea Silverman is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. In an effort to protect public health and environmental quality, Dr. Silverman’s research program is focused on detection and disinfection of pathogens in water and wastewater, and evaluation of the processes that determine the fate of microorganisms in the urban and natural water cycles. Applications of Dr. Silverman’s work include water quality and wastewater treatment, the design of natural wastewater treatment systems (e.g., treatment ponds and constructed wetlands), the safe reuse of human waste, and the impact of frequent, hyperlocal flooding on urban environments. Dr. Silverman received a BS in Environmental Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and MS and PhD in Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. She works in both high- and low-resource settings, and has conducted fundamental and applied research in New York and California, USA; Accra, Ghana; and Nairobi, Kenya.
Research Description: Cities require high quality drinking water and wastewater treatment to maintain a healthy population and environment. Research conducted in the Silverman Laboratory is focused on water quality and wastewater treatment, primarily from the perspective of detection and disinfection of waterborne pathogens. Current projects include evaluations of the frequency and impact of hyperlocal, urban floods; mechanisms of disinfection of waterborne pathogens (including antibiotic resistant bacteria and viruses); and sewage surveillance of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Dr. Silverman’s lightning talk will focus on the latter and describe her lab’s partnership with the New York City Department of Environmental Protection to develop and implement NYC’s wastewater-based epidemiology program to aid in pandemic response.
26 Alexander Shermansong
Wagner, CUSP
Alexander Shermansong is an adjunct faculty member at Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and at the Center for Urban Science + Progress. As the founder of Civic Consulting USA, he has designed innovation programs for mayors, created civic partnerships for companies, managed mayor and governor transitions, and fostered equitable entrepreneurial ecosystems. Notable projects include: designing an international prize competition and smart cities accelerator for NYC, helping San Francisco expand a program to embed startups into city agencies, establishing an innovation program with Baltimore, plus data and transformation projects in housing, public safety, transportation, healthcare, workforce, and infrastructure.
A predictor of trends in innovation and impact, Alexander has inspired audiences and advised CEOs and boards, from Oxford University to the creation of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center to the transformation of a hospital system. He even developed "Stanley" the world's first museum guide for handheld computers. Following a degree in classics and computer science from Princeton, Alexander researched mathematics and Aristotle at Cambridge University, and studied leadership at University of Chicago. And he now serves as a publicly elected garbage commissioner.
Research Description: When the focus is government innovation, culture is the elephant in the room. One of the greatest factors for success for any organization in any sector, culture is rarely discussed in concrete terms -- especially at city hall. We are hoping to change that with a new research paper and guidebook for U.S. mayors and city managers. The project grows out of hundreds of conversations we've had with city leaders focused on culture change and a comprehensive case review of three cities— Louisville, Somerville and Kansas City—to draw general lessons for city executives to understand what organizational culture is, why understanding culture is key for delivering for citizens, and practical steps to reshape municipal culture to boost performance.
27 Rae Zimmerman
Wagner
Rae Zimmerman is Research Professor and Professor Emerita of Planning and Public Administration at New York University's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, after being a full-time professor for many years and directing Wagner’s Urban Planning Program five times. Since 1998, she has been Director of the School’s Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems (ICIS), an interdisciplinary infrastructure center, initially with National Science Foundation (NSF) funding. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, past president and Fellow of the international Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) and recipient of SRA’s 2019 Distinguished Achievement Award and 2015 Outstanding Service Award. Recent appointments include member of the first and third New York City Panel on Climate Change and two National Academies committees. Education: B.A. Chemistry, University of California (Berkeley), Master of City Planning, University of Pennsylvania and Ph.D Planning, Columbia University.
Enlarging Infrastructure- based Public Services with Integrated Frameworks for Risk Reduction and Equity for Severe Weather, Climate Change and Pandemics
Infrastructure-based public services are often managed as separate systems. This research presents integrated frameworks in terms of system interconnectivity that allow problems such as conflicts among services and introducing innovations to be assessed, such as multi-modality in the transportation system for alternative transport routes, decentralized routing for electrical power and water, shifts in food system structure and in particular how these systems are interrelated. The frameworks reflect network theory concepts and allow an analysis of rapid changes due to natural and human induced disruptions such as severe weather, climate change, and pandemics as well as the consideration of disparate impacts on different populations and the introduction of innovative solutions to reduce risks. The frameworks are illustrated using cases and scenarios from each of these areas. This research is supported by grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Transportation through the NYU C2Smart Center.
28 Doctoral Student Presenters
Samantha Bean
PhD in Social Psychology
Department of Psychology, Graduate School of Arts & Science
During my undergraduate degree at Arizona State University, I became interested in the legal system and planned to attend law school. However, I quickly learned about the injustices within our legal system and that legal actors are prone to decision-making errors. These errors can lead to dire consequences and too often disproportionately affect Black defendants. These realizations incited my passion for research and led me to pursue my research-focused master’s degree at Arizona State University. I am now a first-year doctoral student at New York University in the social psychology program and my research focuses on how differences in attention to video evidence can affect legal judgments. I want to focus on potential interventions to reduce errors from prejudicial beliefs and hopefully decrease wrongful convictions. Additionally, I am also interested in how neighborhood-specific crime rates can influence people’s legal decision-making preferences and what they believe a criminal looks like.
Attention & Eyewitness Identification
Eyewitness misidentification is the most common contributing factor in wrongful convictions – appearing in 69% of cases (Innocence Project, 2021). Furthermore, Black defendants are disproportionately hurt by mistaken identification. Research reveals that people, specifically those with high (compared to low) prejudicial beliefs, show biased visual attention for out-group members’ faces. My research tests if attention instructions for how to watch a crime video attenuates the influence of prejudicial beliefs by decreasing reliance on prototypical markers of a criminal (i.e., skin color). I found that participants instructed to give attention naturally selected a highly prototypical suspect, whereas those instructed to give equal attention to all elements of the video did not show this bias for prototypically. Additionally, I used participants’ zip codes, NYC Open Data, and US Census data to compute crime rate statistics to investigate if neighborhood-specific crime rates influence participants’ legal decision- making and who they rate as more criminal looking.
29 Alain Boldini
PhD in Mechanical Engineering
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Tandon
Alain Boldini received B.Sc. degree in Aerospace Engineering and M.Sc. degree in Aeronautical Engineering from Politecnico di Milano in 2015 and 2017, and M.Sc. in Aerospace Engineering from Politecnico di Torino in 2018. He is currently a PhD candidate in Mechanical Engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering. He is involved in research in smart advanced materials and in dynamical systems.
A new electronic travel aid for the visually impaired
With a progressively older world population, visual impairment is increasing, drastically affecting the lives of millions of individuals and society at large, which has to cope with healthcare costs and related downstream consequences. In particular, mobility is severely affected by visual impairment, whereby visually impaired individuals are threatened by a number of fixed and moving obstacles, that increase the chance of falling-related injuries. To overcome this problem, we propose an integrated advanced- wearable system based on computer vision and a haptic feedback wearable device, in the form of a belt. The belt utilizes piezoelectric-based actuators, capable of providing vibrotactile feedback about the position of obstacles in the surrounding of the user, which are identified from the computer vision system. This architecture allows real-time, dynamic hazard negotiation and enables low-profile integration into commercial backpacks and hip belts, increasing the acceptance of the device by the visually impaired.
30 Daniel Broid
PhD in Public Administration
Wagner
Daniel Broid is a second-year PhD Candidate. A self-proclaimed bureaucraphile, he is interested in organizational change and innovation within the public sector. Before Wagner, he worked for two of the largest companies in the world in the healthcare and energy sectors: Mexico's Social Security Institute (IMSS) and Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX). While at these government-owned companies, he was involved in implementing reform programs, infrastructure planning and procurement. Daniel also worked at the Ministry of Finance (SHCP) in the Unit that assigns and distributes federal transfers to subnational governments, and spent 2 years as a World Bank consultant. He holds a BA in Political Science (with Honors) and a BA in Economics, from ITAM in Mexico, and a Master’s in City Planning from MIT. His undergraduate thesis on the Political Economy of Property Tax Collection won several awards and produced two publications.
City-Owned Utilities as A Means for Energy Transition? Vancouver’s District Energy Market
This research project investigates how several municipalities in Metro Vancouver accelerated the area’s transition to renewable energy by crafting a competitive low- emissions district energy (DE) market. DE provide centralized heating and cooling for buildings at the neighborhood level and can be effective at reducing emissions. Some municipalities used traditional zoning, regulation and procurement tools, while others also established city-owned utilities. As a result, new district heating systems in metro Vancouver grew from six to fifteen between 2004 and 2015, and some reduced emissions up to 70% (Lee 2015). Preliminary results indicate private investment was initially crowded out but now new private utilities have entered the market and public- private partnerships and new technologies are being developed. However, potential conflicts of interest and unintended consequences are arising: increase use of natural gas, politization of rates and conflicts between city agencies striving for the same social and environmental goals, with different policy tools.
31 Jingqin “Jannie” Gao
PhD in Transportation Engineering
Tandon, C2SMART Transportation Center
Jingqin (Jannie) Gao completed her Ph.D. in Transportation Planning and Engineering at NYU Tandon, where she works with C2SMART Director Kaan Ozbay. She studied Science and Technology of Optical Information and received her B.S. from Tongji University in China and her M.S in Transportation Planning and Engineering from New York University. Her research interests lie in offline and real-time simulation modeling, big data and machine learning approach for transportation, and transportation economics.
The effect of COVID-19 on Urban Transportation Systems
The COVID-19 outbreak has dramatically changed travel behavior in cities across the world. With changed travel demand, economic activity, and social-distancing/stay-at- home policies, transportation systems have experienced an unprecedented shift in demand and usage. Since the start of the pandemic, the C2SMART research team has been collecting data and investigating the impact of COVID-19 on mobility and sociability, including: Passenger travel and freight traffic trends Mode shift and usage based on various policies Effect of social distancing policies on transit use and emissions Sidewalk, crosswalk, and intersection crowd density Effect of COVID-19 Policies on Transportation Systems Leveraging open data from multiple sources, this project features both traditional and innovative techniques such as data mining and visualization, agent-based traffic simulation model and real-time computer vision technique, to help researchers and transportation authorities understand and observe the impact of the pandemic on transportation. As a result, we have created a one-of-a- kind, free, and publicly accessible, open-data dashboard aggregating multiple data feeds in one place.
32 Katia Meggiorin
PhD in Management and Organizations
Stern School of Business
Katia Meggiorin is a PhD candidate in the department of Management and Organizations at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. Katia’s research focuses on sharing economy competitive dynamics. Specifically, she is interested in understanding how collective perception held by stakeholders (e.g. service providers, and consumers) of sharing economy platforms shape the competitive dynamics in the industry and its market power. Katia's dissertation looks at how the perception of regulatory uncertainty held by heterogeneous users on a sharing economy platform, affect the competitive dynamics within the platform and its overall performance. Before joining NYU, Katia completed a Master of Research in Management at IE Business School (ES), where she has also worked as research assistant for one year. Katia also holds a Master of Research in Communication at University of Amsterdam (NL) and a Bachelor in Public Relationships and advertising at IULM University (IT).
Category Fuzziness and Competitive Dynamics across Categories: Evidence from the Sharing Economy
This study examines how a category's fuzzy boundaries, due to spanning actors in the category or to undefined category attributes, affect the competitive dynamics in different categories. We use a unique, hand-coded longitudinal dataset of approximately 90,500 service providers on Airbnb, matched with real estate market data in 10 U.S. cities in the 2008–2015 period, and the legislative changes implemented in three of these cities. We find that the entry of spanners in Airbnb leads to an increase of real estate property prices. We also find that the effect of spanners’ entry on real estate prices diminishes in those cities that implement regulations to define the attributes necessary for actors to compete in the category and therefore the boundaries of the emerging sharing economy category itself. Our findings contribute to extant conversation on category boundaries, on the effect of spanning on competition, and particularly on regulatory categories.
33 Oscar Oliver-Didier
PhD in American Studies
Department of Social and Cultural Analysis
Bronx based urban designer and researcher from Puerto Rico that, after 15 years as an educator and practitioner, was recently admitted as an American Studies PhD student at SCA. Additionally, a member of the adjunct faculty at the Visual Arts Program at Fordham University, he has taught at The New School Parsons and at the School of Architecture at the PUPR. Until recently, he served as the Senior Lead Urban Designer for the borough of the Bronx at the NYC Department of City Planning (2015- 2020). His research interests include urban/racial phenomena and the role of memory in the formation of Latinx spatial imaginaries. He has published on public housing in Puerto Rico, the politics of language in the South Bronx, and the performative nature of urban protests. He holds a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard University (2006) and a bachelor’s degree in architecture from PUPR with distinction (2004). In 2019 he was awarded the Michael Weil Award for Urban Design; a recognition of excellence in the pursuit of urban design in the public sector.
Radicalism on the Ground: A Visual and Oral Record of the June 2020 New York City Protests
Protesting is a spatial practice that takes place in, and makes use of, our urban environments. To make change possible, protesters need to be seen and heard en masse. Protests, in this sense, are performative. But in the way they are planned and regimented to safely and effectively convey bodies through streets, they also have a distinctly militaristic quality. What happened on the ground during the June 2020 protests in New York City? John Xavier Acosta, an anti-racist movement and protest leader, and architect and protest photographer Gabriel Hernández Solano document the month’s events verbally and visually. Our group created detailed diagrams that not only help explain how these protests and occupations unfolded in place, but also serve as a visual record of police brutality, and as a catalogue of the diverse and evolving roles of protesters to claim public space. There is much to learn from these fleeting, yet radical spatial practices that are laden with inspirational scenes of kinship and joy.
34 Urban Initiative Co-Directors
Thomas Sugrue, Faculty Chair
Thomas J. Sugrue is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at NYU. A specialist in twentieth-century American politics, urban history, civil rights, and race, Sugrue was educated at Columbia; King's College, Cambridge; and Harvard, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1992. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an elected member of the Society of American Historians, and past president of both the Urban History Association and the Social Science History Association. He taught from 1991-2015 at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was David Boies Professor of History and Sociology and founding director of the Penn Social Science and Policy Forum.
Daniel Neill, Selection Committee Chair Daniel B. Neill is Associate Professor of Computer Science and Public Service at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and Courant Institute Department of Computer Science, and Associate Professor of Urban Analytics at NYU's Center for Urban Science and Progress. He was previously a tenured faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College, where he was the Dean’s Career Development Professor, Associate Professor of Information Systems, and Director of the Event and Pattern Detection Laboratory. Daniel's research focuses on developing new methods for machine learning and event detection in massive and complex datasets, with applications ranging from medicine and public health to law enforcement and urban analytics He works closely with organizations including public health, police departments, hospitals, and city leaders to create and deploy data-driven tools and systems to improve the quality of public health, safety, and security, for example, through the early detection of disease outbreaks and through predicting and preventing hot-spots of violent crime. Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Urban Research Seminar Instructor Gianpaolo Baiocchi is a sociologist and an ethnographer interested in questions of politics and culture, critical social theory, and cities. He has written about and continues to research instances of actually existing civic life and participatory democracy. His most recent work is Popular Democracy: The Paradox of Participation (Stanford University Press, 2016), which he co-authored with Ernesto Ganuza. The Civic Imagination: Making a Difference in American Political Life (co- authored with Elizabeth Bennett, Alissa Cordner, Stephanie Savell, and Peter Klein; Paradigm Publishers, 2014) examines the contours and limits of the democratic conversation in the US today. He is also the author, along with Patrick Heller and
35 Marcelo K. Silva, of Bootstrapping Democracy: Experiments in Urban Governance in Brazil (Stanford University Press, 2011) and Militants and Citizens: Local Democracy on a Global Stage in Porto Alegre (Stanford University Press, 2005). He is the editor of Radicals in Power: Experiments in Urban Democracy in Brazil (Zed Press, 2003). An engaged scholar, Baiocchi was one of the founders of the Participatory Budgeting Project and continues to work with groups improving urban democracy. He heads Gallatin’s Urban Democracy Lab, which launched in 2014 and which provides a space for scholars and practitioners to collaborate and exchange ideas for cultivating just, sustainable, and creative urban futures.
Audrey Trainor, Urban Research Seminar Instructor
Audrey A. Trainor, PhD, studies equity and diversity in special education, focusing on postsecondary transitions for adolescents with learning and behavioral-emotional disabilities. A central purpose of her work is to improve inclusive transition education and postschool outcomes for adolescents with disabilities who are made vulnerable by limited access to educational opportunities. Using capital theory, her projects examine how economic, cultural, and social capital coalesce and function as levers for power and agency in special education processes. She is currently the principal investigator for the IES-funded project, Factors Associated with Postsecondary Success for English Language Learners with Disabilities: A Mixed Methods Exploration. This study includes secondary analyses of the NLTS 2012 transition experiences and postschool outcome data of multilingual learners with disabilities and qualitative explorations of these experiences and outcomes for high school and postsecondary students in New York City. Her books and articles focus on qualitative research methodology and ethics, in addition to special education transitions from high school to adulthood. Trainor is a past president (2012-13) of the Council for Exceptional Children's Division on Career Development and Transition. She was awarded the 2015 DCDT Sitlington Research Award, and named the 2014 Gershman/Ahler Distinguished Lecturer in Qualitative Research. Prior to her career in postsecondary education, she was a special education high school teacher working with students with disabilities for nearly a decade.
36 Urban Faculty Advisory Committee
Kris Day, Vice Provost
Dr. Day’s academic background focuses on the role of built environment to influence human behavior and well-being; her specific research has examined urban planning and design strategies to encourage walking and physical activity, focusing on cities in the US and China. She has also studied ways in which public spaces can be safer and more inclusive for women and people of color. Dr. Day has been at NYU since 2010; as a faculty member in the Tandon School of Engineering, she served as the Associate Dean of Academic Administration. In this position, she oversaw faculty hiring and promotion, professional development, and diversity and inclusion.
Prior to joining the Tandon faculty, Dr. Day was professor of urban planning at the University of California, Irvine. At UC Irvine, she served as university-wide Director of Community Engagement. She is past Chair of the Environmental Design Research Association and was a fellow of the American Council on Education. She earned her Ph.D. in Architecture (Environment-Behavior Studies) from the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee.
Lorna Thorpe, School of Medicine
Lorna Thorpe, PhD, MPH, is a Professor of Epidemiology, Director of the Division of Epidemiology, as well as Vice Chair of Strategy and Planning in the Department of Population Health. Dr. Thorpe is a leading expert in population health surveillance and performing population-based studies. Her current research focuses on the intersection between epidemiology and policy, particularly with respect to chronic disease prevention and management and improving modern forms of public health surveillance. She is co-principal investigator of the NYU-CUNY Prevention Research Center funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a center aimed at reducing cardiovascular disease disparities through evaluation of innovative community-clinical linkage initiatives in low-income communities. She also serves as principal investigator of the New York City Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NYC HANES 2013) that aims to evaluate a number of municipal health policies launched in the past decade, as well as validate the use of electronic health records for population health surveillance purposes.
Clayton Gillette, NYU Law and Marron Institute of Urban Management
Clayton Gillette is the Director of NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management and the Max E. Greenberg Professor of Contract Law at the NYU School of Law. Gillette teaches in the areas of local government law, commercial law, and contracts. As Director of the Marron Institute, Gillette oversees programs in which Marron faculty
37 members work directly with localities, other governmental entities, and private parties to improve the delivery of municipal services. He is the author of Local Redistribution and Local Democracy: Interest Groups and the Courts, and co-author of Local Government Law: Cases and Materials (with Lynn Baker), and Municipal Debt Finance Law (with Robert S. Amdursky and Allen G. Bass). He has written numerous articles on various aspects of local government law, with particular focus on municipal finance. Gillette’s work in local government explores subjects ranging from the appropriate degree of municipal fiscal autonomy, to the scope of home rule, to the appropriate allocation of municipal resources among residents, creditors, and other stakeholders in municipal bankruptcy.
Eric Klinenberg, NYU Arts & Science
Eric Klinenberg is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He’s also editor of the journal Public Culture, and an affiliated faculty member of the Wagner School of Public Service and the Department of Media, Culture, and Communications. Klinenberg is currently leading a major research project on climate change and the future of cities. Part of this work involves a sociological investigation of Superstorm Sandy and the challenge of adapting to the emerging age of extreme, dangerous weather. “Adaptation,” the first article from this research, appeared in the New Yorker in 2013. At NYU, Professor Klinenberg teaches courses on cities, climate change, culture, and media, as well as graduate seminars on research methods, ethnography, and urban design.
Michael Lindsey, McSilver Institute for Poverty, Policy, and Research
Dr. Michael A. Lindsey is a noted scholar in the field of child and adolescent mental health, as well as a leader in the search for knowledge and solutions to generational poverty and inequality. He is the Executive Director of McSilver Institute, the Martin Silver Professor of Poverty Studies at NYU Silver School of Social Work, and an Aspen Health Innovators Fellow. He also leads a university- wide Strategies to Reduce Inequality initiative from the McSilver Institute.
Dr. Lindsey’s current research, which is funded by the Robin Hood Foundation, involves the delivery of an innovative intervention aimed at decreasing PTSD and depression symptoms and improving positive parenting skills in child-welfare involved mothers with trauma-related disorders. As a child and adolescent mental health services researcher, he has received research support from the National Institute of Mental Health to develop and test the Making Connections Intervention, a treatment engagement intervention that promotes access to and use of mental health services among depressed and traumatized teens in schools.
38 Katherine O’Regan, NYU Wagner
Katherine O'Regan is Professor of Public Policy and Planning at NYU Wagner. She also serves as Faculty Director of the Master of Science in Public Policy Program and Faculty Director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. She spent April, 2014-January, 2017 in the Obama Administration, serving as the Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley and spent ten years teaching at the Yale School of Management prior to joining the Wagner faculty in 2000. She teaches courses in microeconomics, poverty, program evaluation, and urban economics, and has received teaching awards from Berkeley, Yale, and NYU.
Semiha Ergan, NYU Tandon
Semiha Ergan is a faculty at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, Department of Civil and Urban Engineering with a courtesy appointment at NYU Department of Computer Science and Engineering. She is also an associated faculty member at Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP). Prior to joining NYU, she was a research faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, where she received her Ph.D.
Caran Hartsfield, NYU Tisch
Caran Hartsfield is an award winning screenwriter and director. Her film work has won awards at the Director’s Guild of America, Sundance Film Festival, and Cannes Film Festival (among others). Her feature screenplay, Bury Me Standing, won the Sundance NHK Award, the Sundance Annenberg Award, the IFP Parks Screenplay Award, The Media Arts Grant (formally known as the Rockefeller Grant), and was a part of the Cannes Film Festival L’Atelier. Bury Me Standing was workshopped at the prestigious Sundance Screenwriter's Lab and later went on to the Sundance Filmmaker’s Lab. Professor Hartsfield has also won numerous honors and awards for writing and directing Double-Handed, Kiss it up to God, King, and Six Things I Never Told You including: 2nd Place at Cannes Film Festival, the Director’s Guild of America Award, “The Best of Sundance Film Tour”, the Martin Scorsese Fellowship, the Spike Lee Fellowship, the Warner Brothers Grant, and the New York Foundation for the Arts Film Fellowship, among others. She is currently in development on her next feature, Red Moon, Blue Cat as well as a new television series Human Resources.
Professor Hartsfield received her Bachelors of Arts from Hampton University and her Masters of Fine Arts from New York University’s Graduate Film Department. She has been teaching writing and directing film for over 15 years.
39 Jo Ivey Boufford, School of Global Public Health
Jo Ivey Boufford, M.D., is Clinical Professor of Global Health at the New York University School of Global Public Health and Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at New York University School of Medicine. She is President Emeritus of The New York Academy of Medicine and Immediate Past President of the International Society for Urban Health (2017-9). She served as Dean of the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University from June 1997 to November 2002. Prior to that, she served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from November 1993 to January 1997, and as Acting Assistant Secretary from January 1997 to May 1997. While at HHS, she was the U.S. representative on the Executive Board of the World Health Organization (WHO) from 1994–1997. She served in a variety of senior positions in and as President of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC), the largest municipal system in the United States, from December 1985 until October 1989. In NYC, she currently serves on the Board of the United Hospital Fund, is Vice Chair of the NYS Public Health and Health Planning Council (PHHPC) and Chair of its Public Health Committee. Nationally, she is on the Boards of the National Hispanic Health Foundation and the Health Effects Institute. She was elected to membership in the US National Academy of Medicine (formerly IOM) in 1992, served on its Board on Global Health, and served two four year terms as its Foreign Secretary from 2003 to 2011, She was elected to membership of the National Academy of Public Administration in 2015. She is a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine. Dr. Boufford attended Wellesley College for two years and received her BA (Psychology) magna cum laude from the University of Michigan, and her MD, with distinction, from the University of Michigan Medical School. She is Board Certified in pediatrics.
40 2020-2021 Urban Doctoral Fellows
Bennett Allen
Bennett Allen is a PhD student in Epidemiology in the Department of Population Health at the Grossman School of Medicine, where he studies drug policy and the opioid epidemic. His research focuses on supply-side and municipal-level strategies to reduce overdose death. Current projects examine the effects of drug prosecutions on opioid prescribing, the role of prescription drug monitoring programs in pani management cessation, and geospatial prediction of opioid overdose mortality risk. Prior to joining Grossman, he worked in drug policy for the New York City government.
Ankit Bhardwaj
Ankit Bhardwaj is a PhD student in Sociology at New York University and studies the social and political aspects of decarbonization in the urban Global North and South. He is interested in how bureaucrats, experts, engineers, residents, and social movements negotiate the production of low-carbon space and urban infrastructure. Before joining NYU, Ankit was based at the Centre for Policy Research, New Deli h and LSE Cities, London. His research is published in Environmental Research Letters, WIREs Climate Change,d a n Energy Researchd Social an Sc ience and he contributed to the United Nations Environment Programme’s Emissions Gap Report in 2019. He holds an MSc. in City Design and Social Science from London School of Economics and a. BASc in Civil Engineering from University of Toronto and tweets with the handle @ankitbhardy.
Brittany Matthews
Brittany Matthews, Ed.M., is a doctoral fellow in the Counseling Psychology program at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. She is broadly interested in increasing access to evidence-based and culturally informed mental health care for youth and families in under- resourced, urban communities. Her current research examines barriers to care for families seeking mental health services for their children. This work evaluates potential disparities in access due to location and urbanicity of a community as well as disparities due to systemic issues like insurance coverage. She is also working on a project to evaluate the impact of family peer advocates on increasing engagement in mental health services rfo families and children – which is critical for understanding, supporting and expanding the role of family peer advocates to better serve urban populations. Prior to NYU, Brittany graduated with a B.A. in Psychology from Vanderbilt
41 University and earned her Ed.M. in Prevention Science and Practice from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, with a concentration in Prevention Research.
Chris Ick
Chris Ick is a doctoral student at the Center For Data Science. His research interests are music information retrieval, recommender systems, and urban sound, the latter being the focus of his current research project. He's currently researching robust methods in sound event detection in cities, using an interconnected sensor network distributed across NYC. His work's objective is to develop intelligent predictive models for sound in urban environments that will lead to more equitable sound control measures, making cities healthier and more comfortable places to live.
Erica Wood
Erica Wood is a second year doctoral student in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the School of Global Public Health. Her research utilizes longitudinal methods to examine the association between the intersection of multiple forms of discrimination (e.g., sexual orientation-related and racial/ethnic-identity related discrimination) and mental and physical health outcomes among sexual and gender minorities, with a particular focus on those residing in urban environments. Her work is published in numerous academic journals, including Psychoneuroendocrinology and the Journal of Sex Research. She holds a BS in Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin and an MPH from Columbia University.
Fiona Dunn
Fiona Dunn is a Ph.D. candidate in environmental engineering in the Department of Civil and Urban Engineering at the Tandon School of Engineering where she works with Dr. Andrea Silverman. Fiona is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Her doctoral research focuses on the decay of antibiotic resistant bacteria and their resistance genes (the genes that encode for resistance to antibiotics) in the environment. Fiona’s broader interests include water treatment, disinfection of waterborne pathogens, and urban water and sanitation systems. She aims to use her technical background in science and engineering to influence and better inform policy in order to protect public health. She holds an M.S. in environmental engineering from New York University and a B.S. in civil and environmental engineering from Manhattan College.
42 Isaac Hand
Isaac Hand is a sixth year doctoral candidate in the Joint Program of History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. His research explores the climate of ideas around cities in the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic and it follows how these ideas gave shape to Turkey's first municipal governments and city plans. Focusing mainly on Istanbul and Izmir, his dissertation traces how a diverse assortment of actors, including medical doctors, German socialist emigres, and eugenicists, influenced the development of Turkish urban life. Prior to NYU, he studied in MIT's Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture and he completed an MA in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago.
Mariana Veras
Mariana Veras is a third-year doctoral student in Sociology. She is interested in the narratives built around technocratic reforms to the criminal justice system, and the manner in which health, housing, and criminal justice systems interact to affect the lives of individuals with mental health needs and substance use disorders. She completed her undergraduate studies at Middlebury College, and holds a Masters in Applied Mathematics from Hunter College. Before beginning her doctoral studies, Mariana worked for the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice and in research nonprofits for a number of years.
Natalia Vasquez
Natalia Aguilar Vasquez is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She focuses on the impact of violence and post-violence in the redefinition of “home” and the spatial and symbolic reconfigurations of houses as seen in contemporary literature and visual arts in Colombia and Mexico. Her research investigates what she calls “aesthetics of dwelling”: creative resources and survival strategies developed by precarious subjects to inhabit capitalist environments and spaces. Before coming to NYU she studied literature in Colombia and obtained a Masters degree in Contemporary Art and World Art Studies from Leiden University.
Nico Chen
Nico is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) program at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. He is a critical learning scientist who looks closely at teachers’ design thinking in dynamic plurilingual classrooms. In exploring the complexities of the instructional design process, he asks: “How do teachers use language and making in order to effectively engage students in civil conversations and social healing?” Using critical discourse analysis,
43 ethnography, and photography, his research seeks to inscribe the lingua mundi of plurilingual communities engaged in democratic and transformative learning. In the past, Nico worked as an English Language Arts teacher in Oakland, CA, and as an international educator in a variety of projects in Kazakhstan, Myanmar, China, Taiwan, and Senegal. His forte is in designing learning environments with an emphasis on creativity, English language acquisition, critical thinking, and cross-cultural empathetic communication. Take a closer look at his projects at pathsofreverie.com.
Oscar Oliver-Didier
Oscar is a Bronx based urban designer and researcher from Puerto Rico. He is an American Studies doctoral student in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis in FAS. His research interests include urban/racial phenomena and the role of memory in the formation of Latinx spatial imaginaries. He has published on public housing in Puerto Rico, the politics of language in the South Bronx, and the performative nature of urban protests. Oscar has recently served as the Senior Lead Urban Designer for the borough of the Bronx at the NYC Department of City Planning and as a member of the adjunct faculty at the Visual Arts Program at Fordham University. He has also taught at The New School Parsons and at the School of Architecture at the PUPR. Oscar holds a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree in architecture from PUPR with distinction. In 2019 he was awarded the Michael Weil Award for Urban Design; a recognition of excellence in the pursuit of urban design in the public sector, and the Héctor R. Arce Quintero Award in 2012; recognizing the work of an individual that promotes the city through practice, academia and/or the public sector.
Riley Sandel
Riley Sandel is a doctoral student at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. Sandel’s research interests utilize mixed-methods to better grasp an understanding of the relationship between urban policy and neighborhood-level urban phenomena (such as gentrification, segregation, economic immobility, and much more). As a doctoral student, Sandel works with their Faculty Advisor - Dr. Jacob William Faber - and the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. Prior to NYU, Sandel completed an undergraduate and graduate degree in Indiana, studying architecture and public administration, respectively.
Yasmeen Chism
Yasmeen Chism is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Performance Studies and her dissertation, Tracing Black Movements: Chor[e]ographing Black Dis/placements in North Carolina’s Piedmont, combines Performance Studies,
44 Critical Urban Studies, and Black Feminist Theories. Yasmeen seeks to unsettle notions of urbanity, contends that definitions of urban space are fluid, and suggests that the ascription of meaning to place can be made by tracing the contours of a region as opposed to a singular city. This project also incorporates archival assemblage to work with North Carolina’s robust Black radical tradition. Finally, Yasmeen’s dissertation asserts that the mapping of North Carolina’s Piedmont can also demonstrate the scope of black dis/placements as a set of national and international phenomena. Yasmeen Chism earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina- Greensboro where she majored in African American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies. At the University of Louisville, she earned a master’s degree in Women’s and Gender studies and at New York University, she earned her master’s degree in Performance Studies.
45 Resources
• Hosting an urban event? List your event on the main NYU events page, tag “urban,” and your event will automatically populate the Urban Initiative events listing.
• Join the urban faculty listserv – email [email protected]
• Watch recordings of Urban Initiative events on our Youtube page.
• Check out Urban Initiative events page for updates on urban events held at NYU, including our Urban Research Seminar series.
• Be sure to tag your course as "urban" in Albert. Reach out to us to add your urban course to our undergraduate urban course list.
• Follow us on Twitter @NYUurban.
• Urban Doctoral Fellowship program is now accepting applications for the 2021-22 cohort. Please share widely.