Faculty

Program Head, Interactive Media; Assistant Arts Professor of Interactive Media

Education: Master's in Interactive Telecommunications, New York University (2014); BFA Jazz and Contemporary Music, New School for Social Research (2001); Studio Music and Jazz Program, University of Miami; North Carolina School of the Arts

Aaron Sherwood is an interactive media artist exploring cause and effect through the mediums of sound and light. This takes the form of large-scale audio/visual installations, sound sculptures, guerrilla art interventions, and performance.

His work has been shown at Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, Cameron Arts Museum, Federation Square (Australia), Telfair Museums, Google, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Future of Storytelling conference, Scopitone Festival (France), Burning Man Arts Festival, Bonnaroo Music Festival, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art (Portugal), Festival of Curiosity (Ireland), Currents New Media Festival, the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, and many more.

Assistant Professor Of Literature

Education: BA American University of Beirut; MA American University of Beirut; Ph.D. Emory University

Over the course of her academic career, Kesrouany has taught courses in Arabic and postcolonial literature, modern British literature and culture, the novel, literary theory in a comparative framework, and Middle Eastern studies. At NYU Abu Dhabi, Kesrouany will be teaching courses such as “Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature.”

Kesrouany’s book entitled Prophetic Translation: The Promise of European Literature in the Egyptian Imaginary was published by Edinburgh University Press in January 2019. The book explores translations of French and British literature and philosophy into Arabic around the turn of the 20th century and their impact on modern Arabic narrative and thought. Other publications deal more specifically with the translation and teaching of Arabic literature, the history of criticism, and the role of the public intellectual in the Arab world today. Her current research project – Conversions with No Endings: Aesthetics and Politics in the Arab World – explores visual and literary cultural transformations in Egypt and Lebanon from the 1940s until today.

Assistant Professor of Political Science

Education: BA University of California, Berkeley; AM Harvard University; PhD Harvard University

Aaron Kaufman received his PhD in Political Methodology and American Politics from Harvard University in April 2019. His research interests leverage cutting-edge methods in computer science and causal inference to answer substantive questions about public opinion, voting patterns, and elite behavior. Additionally, he produces open-source tools to help survey researchers conduct more efficient and unbiased research. He is committed to research transparency and open science.

In his dissertation, he builds, tests, and experimentally validates a computational model to estimate partisanship from free text. He extends this model to predict the relative biases of public opinion survey questions and shows that voters respond predictably to texts with varying bias. Furthermore, he shows that survey firms have consistently trended toward writing more conservative questions over the past two decades.

Assistant Professor of Social Research and Public Policy

Education: BA Harvard University; Ph.D. University of Oxford

May Al-Dabbagh She conducts research on gender and work in the Gulf using a combination of social psychology, public policy, and post-colonial feminist lenses. She has published in Organization Science, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, and Idafat: Arab Journal of Sociology (in Arabic). She has received fellowships from the Center of Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), The Women and Public Policy Program (Harvard), and The Global Institute for Advanced Study and Tisch School of the Arts (NYU).

Her current book project is on global cities and the way in which professional women make home and work in the context of serial migration. She also has a project on the geopolitics of knowledge production and developed a method called Self Tracing which uses dialogical exchange and critical pedagogy to theorize intersectionality in the global south. Finally, she has art collaborations that bridge the social sciences and the arts, including: Making Space, Moving Bodies/Theorizing up, and Voice (re) Claimed.

Assistant Professor of Engineering, Director, Center for Cyber Security

Education: MSc, Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Informatique et de Mathématiques Appliquées de Grenoble; PhD, Danmarks Tekniske Universitet (DTU)

Hoda A. Al Khzaimi is currently a research assistant professor at New York University Abu Dhabi and the Director of Center of Cyber Security in New York University Abu Dhabi. She served in different posts for research and development in Cyber Security and Cryptology for the past years. She headed the Department of Research and Development for Cyber Security and Cryptology in different national initiatives in the United Arab Emirates along with her associations to different security initiatives nationally and internationally.

Alkhzaimi has specific expertise in Cryptology; cryptanalysis, constructing and validating security hardware and software components, constructing trusted security architectures for different environments in different products for the respective industries.

Director, Center of Cyber Security; Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Education: PhD, The University of California San Diego

Professor Sinanoglu’s research interests include design-for-test, design-for-security, and design-for-trust for VLSI circuits, where he has more than 200 conference and journal papers, and 20 issued and pending US Patents. He is the recipient of the best paper awards at IEEE VLSI Test Symposium 2011 and ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security 2013. Sinanoglu has given around two dozen tutorials on hardware security and trust in leading CAD and test conferences, such as DAC, DATE, ITC, VTS, ETS, ICCD, ISQED, etc. He is serving or has served as general/program/track/topic chair or technical program committee member in about 20 conferences, and as (guest) associate editor for IEEE TIFS, IEEE TETC, IEEE TCAD, ACM JETC, Elsevier MEJ, JETTA, and IET CDT journals. He chaired and hosted the top cybersecurity conference in Asia, ACM ASIACCS 2017, in Abu Dhabi.

Professor Sinanoglu is the lead PI and the managing director of the Center for CyberSecurity and the director of the Design-for-Excellence Lab at NYU Abu Dhabi. His recent research in hardware security and trust has been funded by US National Science Foundation, US Department of Defense (Army Research Office and DARPA), Intel Corporation, Semiconductor Research Corporation, and Mubadala Technology. Sinanoglu received the inaugural NYUAD Distinguished Research Award in 2021. Also in 2021, he was inducted into the Mohammed bin Rashid Academy of Science in the UAE.

Associate Professor of Physics
Education: Ph.D. and AM Astronomy, Harvard University

Joseph Gelfand's scholarly focus is core-collapse supernovae — the cosmic explosions believed to mark the death of the most massive stars, in particular, the neutron stars and pulsar wind nebulae formed in these events. More broadly, he studies radio and X-ray active galactic nuclei, high redshift radio galaxies, the acceleration and propagation of cosmic rays, and the evolution of massive stars. He is the lead author of a series of peer-reviewed articles in The Astrophysical Journal. He moves to NYU Abu Dhabi from NYU's New York campus, where he was a National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow. Gelfand was the recipient of a Loomis Research Grant at Harvard and, as an undergraduate at Columbia University in New York, was a Rabi Scholar and the recipient of a Robert C. Byrd College Scholarship.

Gelfand is collaborating with other science professors at NYU Abu Dhabi to develop the innovative Foundations of Science cross-disciplinary curriculum for science and engineering majors and will be co-teaching the physics component. As a teaching fellow at both Harvard and Columbia, he taught or assisted teaching courses on introductory physics, advanced astronomy, and several courses for non-majors. Additionally, he has hosted a weekly radio show devoted to recent astronomical discoveries, highlighting the basic theories underlying modern physics, the recent thinking in the field, and questions that astronomers are working to answer, and looking to continue such public outreach in Abu Dhabi. Gelfand holds his PhD and an AM in astronomy from Harvard University and a BA in physics, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University.

Associate Professor of Computer Science

Education: BEng University of Aleppo; PhD Southampton University

Talal Rahwan is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2007 from The University of Southampton, UK, where he received the Dean’s Award for Early Career Researcher. His Ph.D. thesis earned him the British Computer Society's Distinguished Dissertation award, which annually recognizes the most outstanding Ph.D. thesis in the UK in Computer Science. He was selected by the IEEE Computer Society as one of the 10 most promising, young Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers in the world. His work appeared in major academic journals, including Nature Communications, Nature Human Behaviour, and Nature Machine Intelligence. His research interests include Data Science, Computational Social Science, Game Theory, and Artificial Intelligence.