NYU Tandon School of Engineering has banner year, leading to continued rise in U.S. News & World Report rankings

Newswise — BROOKLYN, New York, Tuesday, March 29, 2022 – It’s that time of year again, when all eyes turn to the U.S. News & World Report graduate school rankings. In the 15 years since New York University and Polytechnic University came together to form the foundation of NYU Tandon, the school has risen 47 positions in the U.S. News and World Report’s annual Best Graduate Engineering Schools rankings. That’s farther and faster than any other school on the list, with the meteoric rise continuing this year with another jump of 3 positions to #33 – none of which would be possible without the real news: the meaningful and substantive accomplishments fueling our rising stature.  

“I couldn’t be more energized by the quality of our faculty and students’ research, our public and private-sector collaborations, multi-disciplinary teams, and community engagement,” said NYU Tandon’s Dean Jelena Kovačević, “not to mention our growing influence as a force for innovation in the burgeoning startup environment here in Brooklyn.” 

Where to start? Well, we have grabbed headlines in areas too numerous to delineate here, so we chose just a few (well, nearly two dozen): 

• A new Sustainable Engineering Initiative, a real-world, tangible approach to climate change that brings in experts from across the school to focus on engineering for avoidance, mitigation, remediation, and adaptation
• Institute Professor Maurizio Porfiri’s first-ever data science-driven firearms study backed by a $2 million National Science Foundation grant. But that’s not all: In the past year he has applied his spatial-temporal data-modeling prowess to everything from deep-sea sponges’ influence on how water flows around them, to COVID vectors in mid-sized cities, to human migration to flee disasters, and more
• André Taylor, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and a pioneer in advancing the next generation of solar panels and batteries, named among the most inspiring Black Scientists in America
• Khalil Ramadi's research making the brain-gut connection tangible, with an ingestible electro-technology that can directly stimulate the brain to treat certain disease states and conditions without surgery or medication 
• Julia Stoyanovich, director of the Center for Responsible AI, influential in the city’s decision to create protocols for empowering job seekers to know when they are being screened by AI agents, the nation’s first such policy. She also launched a community effort to teach citizens about the increasingly important role of AI in daily life
• Qi Sun, assistant professor of computer science and engineering and a member of the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), is part of a multinational team that has found a way to alter human time perception by tweaking the visual features one experiences in virtual reality 
• A collaboration between Tandon’s Connected Cities with Smart Transportation Tier 1 University Transportation Center (C2SMART), Visualization and Data Analytics Research Center (VIDA), NYU WIRELESS , and NYU Langone that applied tens of thousands of sidewalk images to human augmentation technology that may allow people with low vision to navigate complex urban environments  
• An NYU Tandon student robotics team that proves a consistent “A-lister” in NASA and international competitions 
• Researchers at C2SMART looked at how the city is adapting to post-pandemic life from the transportation perspective: how is urban mobility is responding to economic reopening under social distancing guidelines, from congestion to emissions, and contact exposure in public transit?
• FloodNet, a multi-institution initiative to spot hyperlocal flooding events — co-led by Andrea Silverman and Elizabeth Henaff from Civil and Urban Engineering, CUSP and IDM — expanded its distribution of hyperlocal flood sensors and partnered with the City, with the eventual goal of a metropolitan network of detectors constituting an early-warning system for flooding events — events likely to increase as our oceans warm and storms become less predictable and more severe.
• Elisa Riedo led a team of researchers that used a hot nano-chisel to create artificial bones in a Petri dish. More efficient, detailed artificial bone tissue opens doors to disease modeling, in vitro cell research on targeted therapies, drug screening and more.
• NYU WIRELESS once more took the point position in wireless research by focusing investigations on the next generation of wireless (6G) with research on TeraHertz spectrum, wireless robotics for surgery, remote drones, and much more
• … And NYU WIRELESS Founding Director Theodore (Ted) S. Rappaport and Director Thomas Marzetta are, for the third year in a row, ranked among the most highly cited researchers in the world  
• Researchers at NYU’s Center for Cybersecurity created innovative hardware and software solutions making integrated circuits, software updates, and AI more secure. Brandon Reagan and Mihalis Maniatakos, for example, created a microchip protocol that keeps data sub rosa even when it is decrypted. Siddharth Garg, Benjamin Tan, and Brendan Dolan-Gavitt have discovered vulnerabilities in one of the most popular, open-source machine learning developer tools for writing code
• NYU Tandon’s energetic robotics faculty presented a record number of papers last year at the most prestigious international conference on robotics, the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Among the year’s accomplishments were increasingly sophisticated advances on a low-cost open-source robotics platform for researchers; drones at CUSP’s associated Agile Robotics and Perception Lab (ARPL) that work as teams while carrying suspended payloads; and collaborations  with NYU WIRELESS to lighten the load on robots by putting AI in the cloud and teaching them how to “hear” 5G signals to locate people who may be trapped
• Member of NYU’s Center for Cybersecurity Justin Cappos, an expert in securing the automatic software updates to all of our devices, including computers and cars, made the spotlight for his in-toto framework, which puts an ironclad check on everyone who algorithmically touches software during its trip from development to transmission, and which could have thwarted the disastrous SolarWinds hack  
• NYU Tandon’s VIDA center received a major $5M grant from DARPA to lead an NYU initiative to develop a futuristic, AI-based augmented reality system that, like an invisible expert, could one day give medics on the battlefield, pilots, or anyone doing complex tasks, real-time advice 
• A Tandon-led initiative will help healthcare practitioners adopt new data-intensive technologies quicker and easier, thanks to a $2.5 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant 
• Researchers led by Tega Brain, Elizabeth Henaff, and Alex Nathanson at CUSP and the Integrated Design and Media program won the Mozilla Creative Media Award for a global network of solar (and volunteer) powered servers that show how the web can run on the sun   
• Researchers led by Professor Weiqiang Chen and his Applied Micro-bioengineering Laboratory discovered a mechanical basis for the “silent killer”: abdominal aortic aneurysms, by applying engineering principles to the behavior of vascular smooth muscle cells

“When it comes to rankings, I’m always torn, as I think most deans are,” said Kovačević. “On the one hand, I recognize and appreciate their value, and on the other, I don’t think any number will ever do justice to our community’s accomplishments. Regardless, I am proud to see our steady climb to number 33 in the just-released U.S. News and World Report rankings. It is a testament to our faculty, researchers, students, and staff, and their relentless focus on building creative, smart, connected, secure, healthy, and sustainable global urban communities.”

Since the merger of NYU and Brooklyn Poly in 2008, the school has grown rapidly, enjoying a growing roster of award-winning faculty and students pursuing boundary-pushing research, academic work, and entrepreneurial endeavors in state-of-the-art facilities. NYU Tandon continues to supercharge its output of scholarship and its influence: the quality of research. and the faculty & student body, and the number of collaborations and partnerships, have all made the school a recognized nerve center for innovative engineering.

About the New York University Tandon School of Engineering

The NYU Tandon School of Engineering dates to 1854, the founding date for both the New York University School of Civil Engineering and Architecture and the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute. A January 2014 merger created a comprehensive school of education and research in engineering and applied sciences as part of a global university, with close connections to engineering programs at NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai. NYU Tandon is rooted in a vibrant tradition of entrepreneurship, intellectual curiosity, and innovative solutions to humanity’s most pressing global challenges. Research at Tandon focuses on vital intersections between communications/IT, cybersecurity, and data science/AI/robotics systems and tools and critical areas of society that they influence, including emerging media, health, sustainability, and urban living. We believe diversity is integral to excellence, and are creating a vibrant, inclusive, and equitable environment for all of our students, faculty and staff. For more information, visit engineering.nyu.edu.

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