31 New Faculty Members Join NYU Shanghai Community

NYU Shanghai this fall welcomed 31 new full-time faculty in 16 fields ranging from Psychology to Electrical Engineering to Japanese Language for the 2019-2020 school year. 

"We now have over 200 faculty and are delighted to welcome our new cohort of outstanding scholars and teachers, who hail from all over the world,” said Provost Joanna Waley-Cohen. “We are looking forward to a fantastic year!" 

NYU Shanghai’s faculty now represent more than 25 nationalities, ensuring that the university’s researchers and instructors are nearly as diverse as the students they teach.  Chief among the new additions to the NYU Shanghai faculty is Professor of Neuroscience Lu Zhong-Lin, who joins the university as Area Head of Neuroscience, Chief Scientist, and Associate Provost for the Sciences. With his wealth of research experience in both China and the United States, Lu is uniquely well-situated to further the university’s missions of multidisciplinary research and close collaboration with both local and global community partners, said Waley-Cohen.

 This year, the university also welcomes its first lecturer in Japanese language, Yoshihiro Kagawa, as well as its first tenure-track faculty member in Data Science, Ling Shuyang.

“Shuyang is an expert on the mathematical foundations of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and statistics,” said Keith Ross, Dean of Engineering and Computer Science. “In addition to working in an important branch of data science, Shuyang will help us build a stronger bridge between NYU Shanghai’s mathematics and data science programs, two of our campus’s most popular and innovative programs.”

Five new scholars will also be joining  the university’s Interactive Media Arts (IMA) and Interactive Media and Business (IMB) programs. "The IMA and IMB programs have a host of exciting new faculty and classes this semester as we grow the program to support interdisciplinary emerging media scholarship," said Christian Grewell, Associate Director of Interactive Media Arts and the Program on Creativity + Innovation. 

The university is particularly excited to launch a new initiative on AI and Culture, which will be headed by well-known media scholar and now Visiting Professor of Media Arts, Benjamin Bratton. 

Opportunities for multidisciplinary collaboration attracted many new faculty members to NYU Shanghai, including Moumanti Podder, who joins the university as Assistant Professor of Practice in Mathematics. “NYU Shanghai gives me a wonderful environment where I can interact with fellow faculty members, add their ideas to my arsenal of knowledge, meet with visitors from all over the world, and invite my own collaborators over for short visits during which we can engage in research together,” Podder said.

For Podder and others, the quality and diversity of the NYU Shanghai student body, as well as the unique teaching opportunities the campus offers, were major reasons to choose NYU Shanghai. “I decided to come to NYU Shanghai to join a community that works in an exciting direction between students and teachers,” said Roland Auzet, Visiting Clinical Assistant Professor of Arts. “I feel that humanism, trust, courage and belief in a better world are at the center of everyone's actions here. That really impresses me a lot,” Auzet explained.

Amrita Pal, who joins the university as Assistant Professor of Practice in Chemistry, was most excited for the classroom experience. “After the first two lectures, I already realize how much I love teaching, and teaching at NYU Shanghai for that matter, where I can teach a very brilliant class of students who are from all different corners of the world,” said Pal.

“I am so excited to teach an experimental discovery course here, and in the process to inculcate in students a passion for research,” Pal added.

NYU Shanghai’s undergraduate students will also be joined this fall by 89 study away students from the NYU Global Network’s two other portal campuses in New York and Abu Dhabi.  Meanwhile, 285 NYU Shanghai students are studying away this semester at 14 different NYU Global Network sites around the world.

The new faculty members in 2019-2020 are: