NYUAD Institute

Global warming is also an urban crisis, and in the 21st-century, cities around the world have been scrambling to ward off disasters. The talk explores how a new generation of engineers, designers, city planners, and civic groups is addressing dangerous heat waves, extreme precipitation events, hurricanes, and urban conflagrations, with projects that feature social infrastructure. The talk focuses on New York City, as well as discussions of projects in cities around the world.

Speaker

Eric Klinenberg, Helen Gould Shepard Professor in Social Sciences and Director, Institute for Public Knowledge, NYU; Executive Director, NYU Climate Initiative

In collaboration with

NYU Climate Initiative

It is said that all politics is local politics. And yet political news is dominated by national issues and presidential elections. How much do national issues matter in local elections? And in places that lean heavily toward one party, such as Los Angeles, Massachusetts, and New York, what issues divide local politics?

Speaker

Aaron R. Kaufman, Associate Professor of Political Science, NYUAD; Global Network Associate Professor of Politics, NYU

In collaboration with

Center of Interdisciplinary Data Science and Artificial Intelligence

Long before there were leadership seminars, there were campfires. The best leadership wisdom rarely arrives in a slide deck. It comes from a mentor who told you the truth at the right moment, a grandmother's story you didn't understand until years later, a colleague who said the thing nobody else would say. This panel traces how that knowledge actually moves: person to person, generation to generation, story by story. Join our panelists as they explore the origins of their recently-published book Trinity of Leadership: Learners, Thinkers, Tinkerers (Akers Follett Press, 2026) and what they reveal about the oldest way wisdom has ever traveled.

Panel Members

Denise Nelson Nash, VP and Secretary of the Board, Scripps College; Partner, Akers Follett Press

Trish Beck, Clinical Assistant Professor, NYU; Partner, Akers Follett Press

Michael Miller, Associate Dean, CUNY, The Spitzer School of Architecture

Herminio L. Perez, Assistant Dean for Campus Life, Rutgers School of Dental Medicine

Lucas Welter, Chief Organization Development & Strategy Officer, AFS Intercultural Programs

Sharon Counts, Assistant Professor, Parsons, The New School

Moderated by

Erica McGibbon, Senior Director of Academic Affairs, NYU School of Professional Studies

Around seven million years ago, Abu Dhabi was home to a very different landscape and remarkable animal life. Drawing on fossil discoveries from the Al Dhafra region, this presentation explores the making of a new gallery at the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi dedicated to the emirate’s Late Miocene past. Through fossils, scientific research, and detailed reconstructions, the gallery brings this prehistoric environment to life and highlights the significance of Abu Dhabi’s palaeontological heritage.

Speaker

Mark Jonathan Beech, Acting Geoscience Section Head, Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi

In Collaboration with

Natural History Museum

Depression is a common and disabling mental health condition that affects mood, thinking, and behaviour. This talk examines the biological mechanisms underlying depression, including changes in brain chemistry, stress response systems, and neural circuits. It also explores emerging research on the molecular and cellular pathways that may contribute to depression, with particular attention to the role of circadian rhythms and sleep. Increasingly recognized as important factors in the development and persistence of depressive symptoms, these processes offer new perspectives on the biology of depression and potential directions for future research.

Dipesh Chaudhury, Associate Professor of Biology, NYUAD; Co-Director, Health & Cognition Theme, Center for Brain & Health

A single patient’s health leaves behind a scattered trail of data—medical images, health records, clinical notes, biosignals—that no clinician can take in at a glance. This talk asks whether artificial intelligence can draw those fragments into a single, more patient-centered picture. Drawing on recent developments in multimodal AI, Shamout considers how such systems might help clinicians monitor patient health, interpret complex information, and support clinical decision-making, while weighing the real-world challenges of reliability, fairness, and practical usefulness for patients and clinicians alike.

Speaker

Farah Shamout, Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering, NYUAD; Associated Faculty, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, NYU Tandon School of Engineering

Compounding socio-ecological and economic damage from climate change, driven by intense rainfall, sea-level rise, crop failures, ocean warming, and severe coastal erosion makes Zanzibar one of the most climate-vulnerable places on Earth. Most top-down, centralized climate strategies fail or underperform in Zanzibar because of structural mismatches between high-level policymaking and the island's hyper-local socio-ecological realities. This interactive talk discusses a groundbreaking bottom-up climate adaptation initiative co-created by NYU, UNICEF Zanzibar, the State University of Zanzibar (SUZA), and the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar.

Speakers

Chris Dickey, Clinical Associate Professor of Global Public Health, NYU School of Global Public Health

Maëva-Edith Sassou Nguesso, Global Affairs Master's Candidate, NYU

Jackie Roth, Public Administration Master's Candidate, NYU

Sumayyah Muhammad, Master’s Candidate in International Development, NYU SPS

How do we understand the minds of others? This talk explores the foundations of "commonsense psychology" by comparing how infants, adults, and AI systems infer intentions from actions alone. By pitting human intuition against state-of-the-art neural networks, this work tackles foundational debates across psychology, philosophy, and computer science — revealing the origins of intelligence, the divide between natural and artificial minds, and what it will take to build truly human-like, trustworthy AI.

Speaker

Moira R. Dillon, Assistant Professor of Psychology, NYU

The talk explores the historical relationships that exist between the development and the evolution of embryos. What is the link between our developmental origin as individuals (a fertilized egg), on the one hand, and our evolutionary origin as a group of individuals (an ancestral population), on the other hand? And these embryos, are they really extraordinary constructions relying on carefully accumulated, multiple sets of precisely encoded instructions or instead, could they be the mere and only obligatory result of a chaotic program haphazardly built during the past hundreds million years?

Speaker

Denis Duboule, Professor of Genetics and Chair of Evolution of Development and Genomes, Collège de France, Paris

Organized by

Claude Desplan, Silver Professor of Biology and Neuroscience, Department of Biology, NYU

Engineering a solution is one thing; making it work in a high-stakes clinical environment is another. This panel discussion features the minds who build the tech and the hands that use it. Leading bioengineers and frontline clinicians from NYU, NYU Abu Dhabi, the University of Michigan and the University of Maine deconstruct the challenges of medical device innovation. The topics include glaucoma and other chronic diseases such as metabolic, cardiovascular, and neurologic diseases. The discussion also touches on AI, robotics, and wearable technology to improve patient care.

Panel Members

Andreas Hielscher, Professor of of Biomedical Engineering, NYU Tandon School of Engineering

Shy Shoham, Professor of Neuroscience and Ophthalmology, NYU School of Medicine and Tech4Health

Giovanna Guidoboni, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Dean of Engineering and Computing, University of Maine

Manjool Shah, Clinical Associate Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences and Associate Chair of Innovation, University of Michigan

Sefy Paulose Joshi, Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology, NYU Langone Health

Moderated by

Yong-Ak (Rafael) Song, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Bioengineering and 19 Washington Square North Faculty Fellow, NYUAD