NYU Faculty Cluster Hiring Initiative

The cluser hire faculty at the School of Global Public Health (GPH) will be part of the new Center for Anti-racism, Social Justice & Public Health (CASJPH) that will launch in the fall 2021 semester. This cluster will be across departments (e.g., biostatistics, epidemiology, public health policy & management, social & behavioral sciences) within GPH. We seek to recruit faculty whose research, teaching, practice and service is aligned with the mission of the CASJPH to examine racism as a social determinant of health, develop policy and/or practice interventions to address racism and health equity, and conduct translational stakeholder engaged research. Using both mentored and peer collaborations, this cluster hire is designed to spur multidisciplinary public health research and practice with a focus on racism, the social determinants of health (e.g., education, housing, transportation, neighborhoods), and social justice issues in public health. CASJPH will provide methodological, pedagogical, and professional development training for affiliated faculty members.

This cluster brings together several departments and schools across the humanities. The members of this cluster will share interests in the culture and history of Africa, Africans, and the Africa-descended people who have created a vast, culturally rich Black diaspora. This diaspora extends throughout much of the globe and has been especially influential in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean regions.

This cluster seeks scholars whose work spans across four language-based literature programs in FAS. Specifically, the cluster will include scholars of African American, Lusophone and Francophone Atlantic, African and Caribbean literatures. Literature, as an expanded field, in its intersections with other practices such as performance, cinema, music and the arts brings breadth and diversity to literary and cultural studies in our departments and across the university. It will enhance current conversations within and between departments about literary genealogies, blind spots in canonical approaches to literature, and the intersections with other aesthetic practices. African American and diasporic literary studies have expanded tremendously in the past decade, and remain active growth areas in the humanities. This cluster hire will foster this expansion by combining diverse cultural cartographies and languages.

The Building STEM for the Public Good cluster will bring together hires in the Libraries’ Scholarly Communications and Information Policy and Knowledge Access departments and the Bern Dibner (STEM) Library to participate in the public interest technology initiatives at New York University and beyond. Bringing together expertise in scientific data discovery, data curation and organization, open-access scholarship, digital preservation, and STEM engagement, this cluster will bring a key set of library and information science perspectives and theoretical underpinnings to heighten the impact of work already occurring across the university in the fields of education, data journalism, information and technology policy, data science, and more. The positions in this cluster build on a rich tradition of libraries centering the public good in technology development, selection, policy, and implementation, not only to facilitate access to a range of technologies, but also to bring a critical lens to their inherent limitations and biases. NYU Libraries cluster hires serve as a means of continuing this work while making new and exciting connections with other areas of the University active in STEM fields, including the Center for Urban Science and Progress, the Center for Data Science, PRIISM, NYU Abu Dhabi, the Alliance for Public Interest Technology, and many others. The cluster involves three diverse and multifaceted departments across the Division of Libraries: (1) Bern Dibner Library (Brooklyn campus, STEM focused); (2) Scholarly Communications and Information Policy Department; (3) Knowledge Access Department. This cluster provides an opportunity to create multiple effects by increasing inter-department collaboration and innovation. The Libraries’ work, and its contribution to the NYU research enterprise, require nuanced and holistic approaches to providing services to our communities: working closely with the technology-inflected community of researchers in Tandon, our Brooklyn-based programs, and beyond (as the Bern Dibner Library does); framing that work within a larger information ecosystem concerned with openness, access, and the changing face of scholarship (in the case of the Scholarly Communications and Information Policy Department); and developing processes to support world-class research and its communication through curation processes, metadata expertise, and emerging standards of care for the scholarly output of our research communities (a core contribution from our Knowledge Access Department).

The Centering Underrepresented Voices: Anti-Racist Practices in Libraries and Archives cluster within the Division of Libraries will both extend and strengthen the Division of Libraries’commitment to our core values of Inclusion, Diversity, Belonging, Equity, and Accessibility (IDBEA). The positions in the cluster are strategically placed in three core areas of librarianship: collections and subject expertise, description and discovery, and engagement and outreach. The cluster will center underrepresented communities' voices by bringing in new collections of Africana & African American Studies materials in all formats; highlighting emerging streaming media collections including the Native American Film and Video Festival, Chiapas Media Project, and the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library; and creating anti-racist description practices. By reimagining our metadata and systems practices through a lens of IDBEA, we can help ensure that diverse collections are discoverable by and accessible to users. Through engagement and outreach, we can address economic and racial inequality around information culture(s) in our own community at NYU. We will provide holistic support for students (including support for academic, emotional, and financial success) and ensure access to affordable course materials.

We propose to build a research hub of interdisciplinary scholars from diverse backgrounds to understand the mechanisms by which structural inequities impact educational and service organizations that serve children and youth. Understanding the disproportional and detrimental impacts on the learning, development, behavior, mental health, access to resources, and life opportunities for Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and migrant youth is critical. A central focus will be how norms and regularities impact identity and belonging. Hub scholars will seek to understand the mechanisms by which the aforementioned structural inequities impact identity and sense of belonging. and explore and disrupt these negative trajectories by discovering, developing, and testing innovative interventions and policy solutions. To create this hub, we will hire a group of six promising underrepresented research scholars who focus on different parts of this issue and/or different developmental outcomes from diverse disciplinary and methodological perspectives. These new scholars will have a "home" and a senior mentor in one of the five participating departments.

The Health and Scientific Literacy, Openness, and Equity cluster lies at the Intersection of information science, health and scientific literacy, and social justice.  COVID-19’s disproportionate effect on BIPOC communities has amplified attention to inequities caused by structural racism in health care. The last eighteen months have also highlighted the rampant spread of health misinformation and the need for access to sound health and scientific information and expanded health and scientific information literacy. The three positions in this cluster will focus on equity within scientific information culture writ large, and support NYU research and curricular needs in the basic and health sciences, with an emphasis on equity, information literacy, and open scholarship. Two of the positions sit intheLibraries’ Health Sciences department and focus specifically on health equity and health information literacy while the third position sits in the Libraries’Science department, focusing on scientific literacy and open scholarship and bridging basic and healthsciences disciplines.  All three positions address an increased demand for health and science expertise at NYU that specifically engages with profound disparities around health and scientific literacy, access to information, and the politics of information.These positions will assist researchers with projects ranging from evidence syntheses to community science, and will support learners pursuing careersin research (whether in academia or industry) as well as professional practice.

The Health Engineering cluster seeks to recruit world-class faculty who can build bridges between NYU’s fast-growing medical engineering community and physicians in NYU’s world-class medical school and hospitals. Many unmet clinical and healthcare needs can potentially be addressed with emerging technologies in various fields of engineering.  To be effective, close multidisciplinary collaboration between doctors, data scientists, and biomedical, electrical, mechanical, biochemical, and computational engineers are needed. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated and accelerated efforts in this regard. Several technologies developed at NYU have already emerged as crucial tools for containing the spread and impact of the virus. For example, a team of NYU experts in genetics, clinical diagnostics, and robotics has developed a state-of-the-art tool for industrial-scale COVID-19 variant detection, pool testing, and gold-standard PCR testing in only a few months. The cluster will build on and further enhance these activities that transcend traditional academic boundaries. From it, new ideas for interschool initiatives and degrees will emerge that further improve the quality of health care and attract and educate students from diverse backgrounds.

The Minds, Brains, & Machines cluster is created with focus on understanding and engineering intelligence. Understanding intelligence is one of the greatest scientific quests ever undertaken—a challenge that demands an interdisciplinary approach spanning psychology, neural science, data science, and artificial intelligence (AI). A focus on computation is at the center of this quest—viewing intelligence, in all of its forms, as a kind of sophisticated and adaptive computational process. But the kind of computation necessary for intelligence remains an open question; despite striking recent progress in AI, today's technologies provide nothing like the general-purpose, flexible intelligence that we have as humans. We believe that intensifying the dialog between these fields is needed for transformative research on understanding and engineering intelligence, focused on two key questions: How can advances in machine intelligence best advance our understanding of natural (human and animal) intelligence? And how can we best use insights from natural intelligence to develop new, more powerful machine intelligence technologies that more fruitfully interact with us?

This cluster will be composed of scholars of Native American and/or Indigenous Studies. It is envisioned as an interdisciplinary grouping of faculty whose teaching and research explores and increases understanding of the history, the cultural and artistic traditions, and the political experiences of indigenous peoples.

Climate change disproportionately affects communities who suffer from socioeconomic inequalities, in particular people of color. Assessing the impacts of climate change, adapting to its consequences, and developing strategies for mitigating its effects requires a fundamental understanding and robust predictions of different components of the Earth's system (atmosphere, ocean, land, and ice) and their interactions across scales. The cluster hire in climate change prediction, linking global change to impacts at the city scale to inform decision-making and planning for climate change adaptation using data science. This interdisciplinary initiative, between Courant, Tandon, and the Center for Data Science, builds on the university's existing strengths in the sciences, including modeling global and regional climate, methods and applications of data-driven science, and environmental impacts and actions on cities. A cluster hire is necessary to include diverse disciplinary voices, create bridges between different departments at NYU already conducting impactful climate research, establish an inclusive, safe, and productive academic environment, and train the next generation of climate scientists. NYU is uniquely poised to push the boundary of existing climate prediction research, making significant and rapid advances, and taking action at the city and global scale in this critical threat of the 21st century.

As a center of urban research in the nation’s largest and most diverse city, New York University seeks faculty in history, social and cultural analysis, and sociology who are researching race and cities in the Americas. Urban areas, including New York, are home to large diasporic communities of people of African and Latin American descent whose opportunities are profoundly shaped by long histories of segregation, discrimination, and racialized injustice in policing, education, employment, and housing. Those inequalities take spatial form in metropolitan geographies, in the differential distribution of public goods and services across neighborhood and municipal lines, and in a multitude of neighborhood effects of concentrated disadvantage. At the same time, cities are places of innovation and opportunity, the result of community formation, especially the creation and reinvention of urban institutions ranging from commercial institutions to churches. To understand cities—past, present, and future—requires analyzing the processes by which people of color shaped cities, how discrimination and segregation hinders opportunities, how diasporic urbanites reinvent communities, and how insights from history and the social sciences can inform contemporary debates.

The Race, Identity, and Inequality (RII) cluster aims to recruit outstanding scholars whose research will address some of the most vexing political and social problems of our time, in alignment with NYU priority areas: anti-racism and urban environments, politics, and problems. Focusing on these areas will facilitate recruitment of scholars from underrepresented backgrounds who are innovators in our disciplines' scholarship. Through its focus on developing a multidisciplinary network of scholars, the RII cluster promises to provide a more holistic perspective on these problems. The community it seeks to foster and the resources it aims to marshal promise to create a highly attractive environment for scholars working in these areas. The RII cluster will provide a network for scholars to collaborate across NYU and enhance NYU's ability to mentor students from diverse backgrounds, thus accelerating the recruitment of young scholars into academia. The cultivation of this network will aid in retention efforts by fostering attachment to NYU's intellectual community. Coordinating recruitment across units can yield rewards by expanding engagement in bringing outside scholars aboard and by signaling to those scholars that their areas of research are an NYU priority. Research conducted by RII scholars is central to contemporary social sciences and now is the time to take advantage of cross-unit efforts in faculty development.

Matters of representation lie at the center of research and practice in the arts today. The question of how to stand for, speak for, and depict the lives and beliefs of oneself and others is a pressing concern in the arts education curriculum. Who gets represented? Who creates the representations? Who gets left out and why? Who or what controls this depiction? What does it mean to be unrepresented? (Or overrepresented, for that matter) How does political representation align, or not, with representational diversity in culture? These questions unify disparate areas of creative work, from dance to documentary. They also span multiple fields of scholarly practice. This faculty hiring cluster is an innovative partnership among departments within Tisch School of the Arts, and will create a nexus of practice-led research within the School. It seeks out scholars and practitioners whose work analyzes intersections of race, gender, and identity, and shifts perception through innovative strategies of representation.

New York University Libraries is integral to the University’s teaching and research infrastructure, which includes support for inquiry into the problems and opportunities of urban societies. The three positions that comprise The Politics of Space: Data, the City, and Structures of Inequality cluster will enhance a University-wide engagement with urban informatics and data literacy, which are essential to understanding how cities operate, change, and thrive. Two positions are intended to bolster inquiry within specific NYU contexts: Steinhardt’s Education and Human Development programs and Stern’s Business and Economics curricula. The third position, Data Services Librarian, is situated within a Libraries’ department that fosters deeply engaged interdisciplinarity and works with many departments to enhance the research data lifecycle at NYU. Involving three departments in NYU Libraries, this cluster hire anticipates a burgeoning need for information and research technology expertise for those in urban studies-adjacent disciplines at NYU, including educational sociology, educational leadership, and entrepreneurship and innovation. Cities are a register of deep-seated social inequality, often understood through quantitative data analysis and data visualization. NYU Libraries’ Politics of Space cluster looks outward and imagines expanded capacity for urban economics and education disciplines, moored by holistic support for data analysis and visualization across the disciplines at NYU.

Together with climate change, increasing urbanization presents a key global challenge for the twenty-first century. 83% of the US population currently lives in cities, and 68% of the world’s population is expected to live in cities by 2050. Increasing urbanization impacts issues from social inequity to the underlying biology of the environment within cities and beyond, and presents an intensifying challenge to an ecologically vital and socially just urban future. With a major presence in New York and 14 other major cities across the globe, we believe that NYU is ideally positioned to galvanize cutting edge research to better understand urban environmental changes and the social processes that produce and maintain urban social inequality.

The “Transformative Humanities for All: Building and Sharing the Cultural Record” cluster will bring together hires in the Libraries’ Barbara Goldsmith Center for Preservation and Conservation; Research and Research Services Subdivision; Knowledge Access Department; and Digital Scholarship Services Department. The cluster will enhance NYU Libraries’ capabilities to support academic and non-academic knowledge production in the humanities and related disciplines at NYU and beyond. It provides an opportunity to enhance the Libraries’ work, and contribution to the NYU research enterprise, by building and enhancing a set of key knowledge, descriptive, curatorial, and technical services to support and promulgate research and inquiry that centers diverse and underrepresented voices in the humanistic and performing arts spheres; by ethically developing, serving, and making accessible humanistic output within a larger information ecosystem concerned with openness, access, and the changing face of scholarship; and leading the Libraries’ strategic contributions to the work of the emerging field of Public Humanities.  The positions in this cluster build upon the advancement of the humanities. The scholarship conducted by the faculty in these cluster positions will center a transformative approach to building and sharing knowledge through critical, ethical inquiries that focus on the (in)visibility of epistemologies from historically and continuously underrepresented communities. The practicality of this cluster’s work will reside in fostering knowledge creation, identifying and acknowledging current and pre-existing knowledge, and focusing on the relationships between the academy and those communities most implicated by any particular area or approach to knowledge creation. The goal of this cluster is to build a transformative humanities that exists beyond the bounds of what has been known as traditional epistemological processes in the interest of more equitable.