Summer 2016 in Research at NYU Shanghai

Aug 19 2016

NYU Shanghai has been a-buzz all summer with global conferences, workshops and research in fields ranging from molecular biophysics to relations in the Indian Ocean world and even the puberty of worms. Here’s the rundown of what’s been happening.

Academics, financial professionals and policy makers from China and abroad came together this summer to discuss current research on futures, options and other derivative markets at the Volatility Institute at NYU Shanghai (VINS)’s inaugural China Derivatives Markets Conference, co-organized with Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and held at their campus in Suzhou. Read More.

VINS also co-hosted a talk by Robert Steven Kaplan, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, who spoke about monetary policy and the importance of understanding the global economic climate.

More than 180 international and domestic researchers and Ph.D. students participated in the International Conference on the Frontiers in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics, the inaugural conference of the NYU-ECNU Institute of Physics at NYU Shanghai. The conference had a broad selection of the most interesting developments in the AMO field, and lots of the latest exciting research results have been shared by well-known physicists and talented young researchers. Read More.

2016 International Workshop on Frontiers in Molecular Biophysics, a three-day workshop on cutting-edge research in computational molecular biophysics, sponsored by the NYU-ECNU Center for Computational Chemistry at NYU Shanghai was also successfully held at NYU Shanghai. This workshop focused on computational methods and applications in the study of biomolecular interactions such as protein-ligand interaction, which is crucial for designing and discovering new medicine. Read More.

Mathematicians from around the world converged at ECNU Zhongbei Campus for the International Workshop on Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations and Applications, organized by the NYU-ECNU Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU Shanghai, where they delved into the modern development and application of nonlinear PDE.

 

Preeminent brain scientist Stanislas Dehaene, Professor from Collège de France, presented a set of tantalizing recent discoveries to a packed auditorium in the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum. The lecture, co-sponsored by NYU Shanghai, is part of the Shanghai Science Communication Forum, co-organized by the Shanghai Science Education Development Foundation and the Shanghai Museum of Science and Technology. Read More
Some of the world’s most talented graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in neuroscience, physics, mathematics, engineering and computer science were selected to attend NYU Shanghai’s 2016 Computational and Cognitive Neuroscience (CCN) Summer School, which immersed them in lecture sessions and research projects under the guidance of world’s top/leading neuroscientists, including Stanislas Dehaene, Robert Desimone, Michael Hausser, Zachary Mainen, Michael Shadlen, and Xiao-Jing Wang.

AI-Brain Workshop at NYU Shanghai, which focused on areas including learning and multi-modality tasks (language and vision) with joint discussion on the synergies and differences between the two fields, strongly promoted interdisciplinary research work.

 

The Center for Global Asia (CGA), which received a grant of over €150,000 from the prestigious Volkswagen Foundation, held its first international summer school in Germany.  Organized jointly with the Center for Interdisciplinary Area Studies at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, it brought together a group of early-career researchers from across NYU’s Global Network to explore the Indian Ocean World and Eurasian Connections.

CGA will round off the summer season on August 22-24 with a three-day co-sponsored conference on Asia and Intra-Asian Connections held at NYU Shanghai. Workshops and roundtable sessions will focus on China’s place in intra-Asian interactions, and the issues of conceptualizing, researching, and teaching Asia. Awarding-winning author Amitav Ghosh will deliver the keynote speech, in which he will examine the role of Asia, and of European imperialism, in precipitating the climate change crisis—a subject he tackles in his new book, The Great Derangement. Attend Event

 

Among research papers published this summer was Professor Lili’s study on the relationship between playing video games and motorists’ reactions to hazards while driving. Her findings were also covered by the national press in the US, UK and China.

David Fitch, former Interim Dean of Arts and Sciences, has co-authored a paper on how the ‘switch to adulthood’ is triggered in a species of worm. His article “Makorin ortholog LEP-2 regulates LIN-28 stability to promote the juvenile-to-adult transition in Caenorhabditis elegans” appeared in Development.

Arkaraprasertkul’s ethnographic research into urban renewal in a traditional Shanghainese lilong was also recently published in Asian Anthropology.

---
Article by Charlotte San Juan.