Faculty and students within the Graduate School conduct groundbreaking research that exemplifies the varied interests, talents, and minds across our departments and programs.
From the humanities, the sciences, the social sciences, and the arts, here is a closer look at some of the faculty and students in GSAS whose innovative work is helping to shape our future. To read further details, please click through their names.
Kyle Benjamin Brunner
A doctoral candidate, Kyle's work investigates the social dynamics of northern Syria and Iraq at the rise of Islam. Through analysis of Arabic and Syriac texts alongside archeological data, he sheds light on how local communities functioned under early Islamic rule.
Jeff Sebo
Director of the Animal Studies Master's Program, Professor Sebo is examining the relationship among animals, pandemics, and climate change to bring animals into the center of developing health and environmental policies.
Nico Stubler
A master's candidate, Nico's project considers the severe threats that animal agriculture poses to public health--including the creation and spread of pandemics.
Pam J. Crabtree
Professor Crabtree, in collaboration with ISAW doctoral candidate, Nathan Lovejoy, is working on a Late Iron Age assemblage of animal bones from the site of Niğde-Kınık Höyük, Cappadocia, Turkey, to understand animal husbandry patterns, hunting practices, and diet, and what roles animals played in ancient human societies. Their research has identified specific assemblages of bones that appear to be associated with ancient ritual behavior.
Pratiwi Yuwono
Pratiwi is a master's candidate whose research focuses on recently discovered painted art in two archaeological site complexes. Captivated by the prehistoric art on the rock walls she saw while digging on Alor Island in eastern Indonesia, she began to create a digital record of all the paintings with the hope of unearthing the ways in which prehistoric people lived.
Elodie Ghedin and David Gresham
In the Center for Genomic and Systems Biology, the Ghedin and Gresham Labs are decoding the genome of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in hospitalized COVID-19 patients to get a better understanding of the genetic diversity of this virus and how it evolves.
Paramjit Arora
Professor Arora's group has pioneered the synthesis of drug candidates and is using their expertise to develop compounds that block viral entry.
Gordon Brown
A doctoral candidate, Gordon is developing peptide inhibitors of coronavirus-host cell infusion with the goal of rapidly developing antiviral peptides.
Shuhui Chen
Shuhui's doctoral research focuses on studying the critical role of glycosylation in influenza pathogensis. Understanding the cause of influenza severity will help researchers and pharmaceuticals develop effective drugs to treat the disease and may explain the differential susceptibility to infection between different age groups.
Seong-Ho Hong
A doctoral candidate, Seong-Ho is designing compounds to inhibit coronavirus entry into human cells.
Tania Lupoli
Professor Lupoli's Lab is testing the ability of clinically-approved drug molecules to disable a protein that the SARS-CoV-2 virus uses to replicate and modify its genetic material.
Frank Marrone III
In collaboration with the Department of Anthropology, Frank, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Chemistry, uses computational tools to analyze how SARS-CoV-2 interacts with different animal species at the molecular level to modify how we interact with these species during the course of the pandemic.
Rushna Quddus
A doctoral candidate, Rushna is part of a lab that develops a simple, fast, and cost-effective diagnostic method for testing biological samples for viral infection with the goal of testing for viral antigens in order to address the COVID-19 pandemic in the immediate future.
Chao Yang
Chao is a doctoral candidate who uses computational drug discovery methods to help expedite the drug discovery process.
Daniel Yoo
A doctoral candidate, Daniel is developing ACE2 mimics to target the coronavirus spike protein.
Mukund Sudarshan
A doctoral candidate, Mukund works on developing state-of-the-art machine learning methods to assist scientific discovery. Through his research, he helped build an AI tool to predict adverse events for hospitalized COVID patients. The tool was recently integrated into Epic's EHR system and is currently being used by doctors at Langone Health.
Dennis Shasha
Professor Shashna is part of a project that is creating software for epidemiologists and policy-makers to design strategies that combat epidemics. Responding to a pressing need for fast exploration of scenarios in order to guide epidemic policy, the system, called EpiFast, will rapidly evaluate a dynamic programming-based simulation to derive policy reommendations.
Francesco Furno
Doctoral candidate Francesco is developing a stochastic epidemiological model with realistic testing policies to study how fatality rates constructed with detected cases and deaths relates to the true lethality of an epidemic diseases. His goal is to understand the relationship between testing policies and its impact on economic activity and government finances.
Ellen Noonan
Professor Noonan created a website that convened historians in New York City and around the world who began undertaking projects to respond to the COVID-19 projects. This website includes entries for collecting initiatives, exhibits, media providing historical context for the crisis, and classroom materials developed by history educators. This digital archive acts a resource for those who are interested in learning about the wide range of COVID-19-related work that historians are doing.
Pamela Calla
Professor Calla studies anti-racist struggles in the United States and Bolivia. Concentrating on the latter, she is currently exploring the explosive intersectionality between ongoing racism and the outbreak of COVID-19 in the city of Cochabambra, Bolivia, and in Queens, New York City. This comparative research will allow her to provide analysis on how the anti-racist struggle in each national/local site can connect with the more global movements dealing with structural inequality and racism intensified by the COVID-19 health crisis.
Martha Nelle Pskowski
A master's candidate, Martha is researching how scientific expertise has favored hybrid, commercial maize despite the persistence of native maize varities among small-scale farmers in Mexico. Through interviews with farmers, scientists, and policy-makers, she will assess how the state and higher education institutions have either promoted or hindered agro-biodiversity with the goal of understanding how native maize biodiversity has been preserved, in addition to how it can contribute to climate change adaption.
Yelaine Rodriguez
Yelaine is a master's candidate who is working on a multimedia project that incorporates fashion, handwoven panels, video, performance, and photography in response to the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote. Through her research on Afro-synthetic religious traditions found in the Dominican and Haitian African diasporic communities, such as Voodoo and Santeria, she conceptualizes wearable art and costume pieces. Yelaine intends to combine her research on Afro-spirituality with the Black suffragists to create one piece that elevates black and brown women.
Lisa Davidson
Professor Davidson the use of creaky voice ("vocal fry") in women to determine if its occasional use does indeed lead people to perceive an overall lower pitch for that speaker, and whether it suggests that using creaky voice could potentially help overcome the interpretation of higher pitched voices as less dominant.
Laurel MacKenzie
Professor MacKenzie, together with the students and faculty in the NYU Sociolinguistics Lab, studies the linguistic choices speakers make and the social message those choices send. She is specifically interested in the way speakers construct their sentences and the way those syntactic choices are interpreted by listeners. The goal of her research is to better understand the patterns that underlie language variation and change.
Natalie Povilonis de Vilchez
A doctoral candidate, Natalie documents interspeaker variation in the Chanka Quechua language spoken in the Peruvian Andes. She is currently analyzing the speech in casual interviews with native Chanka speakers from a raneg of ages and both sexes, with the goal of documenting and describing how Chanka Quechua is used in everyday life by native speakers and how each individual uses it in distinct ways. Through her research, Natalie aims to validate the range of speech forms currently used and to empower Chanka Quechua speakers to continue language maintenance efforts.
J. Martin Daughtry
For the past four years, Professor Daughtry has been reading and writing a book on the relationship between voice and environment. In this book, tentatively titled Atmospheric Pressures: The Precarious Song of the Anthropocene, he de-emphasizes the human-centered, sound-centered aspects of voice, and instead approaches vocality as a fundamentally atmospheric process. His expansive framework provincializes and defamiliarizes the human voice, thus leading to a deeper understanding of our profound entanglement with one another, with nonhuman creatures, with air pollution, and with large-scale processes like global warming.
Nicholas Haas (with Aida Gureghian, Cristel Jusino Díaz, and Abby Williams)
Now an alumnus, Nicholas conducted a study with members of GSAS administration while he was a doctoral candidate to evaluate whether and how COVID-19 has changed PhD students' aspirations and priorities following the outbreak. The hope of this research is to help inform higher education responses to COVID-19, as well as more generally add insights into how negative economic shocks can affect individuals' career choices.
Massimo Pulejo
A doctoral candidate, Massimo estimates the effect of electoral concerns on the stringency of restrictive measures adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic. His research results show that countries whose leaders are eligible to a further term and have elections closer in time tend to be less strigent, on average.
Laura Elizabeth Gwilliams
A doctoral candidate, Laura uses a machine called magneto-encephalography (MEG) which measures brain activity with millisecond precision to understand how the brain processes speech. By sheding light on the question of how the brain translates noisy, ambiguous, and highly variable acoustic signals to stable and accurate rpresentations of meaning, it will be possible to develop medical devices and interventions to aid individuals with language difficulties.