Active Research & Practitioner Projects

IHDSC houses the Institute of Education Sciences-funded Predoctoral Interdisciplinary Training (IES-PIRT) Program, a rigorous fellowship for doctoral students enrolled as students in various departments across NYU Steinhardt, Wagner, and GSAS. In addition to their coursework, IES-PIRT fellows are placed in research apprenticeships with NYU faculty. Many fellows research education-related topics in urban populations, including: high school choice in New York City Schools; special education students, students with disabilities, and English language learners in New York City Schools; college readiness in the CUNY system; and pre-kindergarten programs in New York City, Boston, and urban Ghana. Additionally, fellows are required to do a policy/practice internship in which they partner with external organizations to put research into practice.  

Sponsoring Organization
Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development

The Research Alliance for New York City Schools conducts rigorous studies on topics that matter to the City’s public schools. We strive to advance equity and excellence in education by providing nonpartisan evidence about policies and practices that promote students' development and academic success.

Sponsoring Organization
Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development

The Community Collaborative Board is an innovative partnership between parents and residents, university researchers, schools, health and youth organizations that directs the implementation of the McSilver’s research projects focused on evidence-based prevention and intervention services. The Community Collaborative Board ensures the cultural appropriateness and sustainability of the institute’s initiatives in poverty-impacted communities.

Sponsoring Organization
McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research

Step-Up is a positive youth development and mental health support program that intervenes with urban teens experiencing challenges to promote academic achievement, mental wellness, and a positive transition to young adulthood. Step-Up is implemented across ecological contexts: Community, School and Family. With grant support from the Robin Hood Foundation and NYC Department of Education, Step-Up is currently serving seven low-resource NYC public high schools. Step-Up has achieved a high school graduation rate over 90% – over 80% of whom go on to higher education.

Sponsoring Organization
McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research

Research suggests that poverty has strong, detrimental effects on early life, producing a need for effective interventions beginning at birth. The SMART Beginnings project seeks to contribute to this need, through an innovative effort in approaching school readiness disparities in low-income families. The SMART Beginnings project is a randomized control trial currently taking place in two urban primary care pediatric units in New York City and Pittsburgh.  

Sponsoring Organization
Steinhardt - Institute of Human Development and Social Change and School of Medicine

Launched in 2003, Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP) is a federally-funded randomized control-trial intervention, which included 602 low-income, ethnic minority preschool-aged children living in seven of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods. The aim of CSRP is to improve low-income, preschool-aged children's chances of success in school. CSRP targets young children's emotional and behavioral adjustment through a comprehensive, classroom-based intervention in Head Start.

Sponsoring Organization
Steinhardt - Institute of Human Development and Social Change

Senior leaders in education in New York City are undertaking arguably one of the most rapidly and broadly deployed educational policy initiatives in the nation, working to dramatically expand universal pre-kindergarten with Pre-K For All (PKA). The purpose of the NYU UPK project is to provide quantitative and capacity-building solutions to two pressing educational problems faced by NYC Department of Education (DOE) in the face of this historic expansion. Learn more about the project here.

Sponsoring Organization
Steinhardt - Institute of Human Development and Social Change

NYU Metro Center promotes equity and opportunity in education through engaged science work: applied research, program evaluation, policy analysis, community engagement, and professional assistance to educational, governmental, and community agencies serving vulnerable populations. It brings together scholars, educators, and innovators from diverse backgrounds to collaborate on a range of projects to strengthen and improve access, opportunity, and educational quality across varied setting, but particularly in striving communities. For nearly four decades, NYU Metro Center has been a partner and resource for schools and school districts throughout the U.S. and beyond, including in Detroit, Denver, Houston, Pittsburgh, San Juan, Washington, D.C., and Wilmington.

Sponsoring Organization
Steinhardt School for Culture, Education, and Human Development

Developed in partnership with the NYC Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), SAFE Spaces uses evidence-based principles to provide training and coaching support for frontline staff working in ACS Close to Home (CTH) non-secure and limited-secure placement facilities.

Through unique skills-based staff training activities and guidance from a trained coach, SAFE Spaces aims to increase the professional development, job satisfaction, retention, and well-being in CTH staff who work directly with youth. By focusing on these staff outcomes and the environment in which they work, we also help to promote and encourage a healthier environment for youth’s lives and promote their safety, well-being and positive development.

Sponsoring Organization
Steinhardt - Institute of Human Development and Social Change

The Wallerstein Collaborative For Urban Environmental Education was established in 2000 in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University to promote environmental literacy and sustainability by working with educators in K-12 classroom settings, graduate students, and faculty in colleges and universities. The Collaborative provides year-round programs developed especially for public school teachers in the metropolitan New York City region to learn how to incorporate environmental education in their classrooms.

Sponsoring Organization
Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development

The Safe Mothers Safe Children (SMSC) intervention seeks to reduce the risk of repeat child maltreatment through a multi-pronged intervention that enhances the identification, case management, and treatment of mothers receiving preventive services. The study intervention is adapted from Skills Training in Affective and Interpersonal Regulation (STAIR), which is designed to treat posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) to foster positive parenting to reduce child maltreatment and enhance maternal and child well-being.

Sponsoring Organization
McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research

We are a group of scholars, teachers, curators, public historians, and advocates dedicated to the study of food in the city. Our work focuses on street food vending and markets in the Global North and South. We investigate laws, policies, and the built environment to learn how they impact the livelihoods of vendors, the lives of urban residents, and the liveliness of cities. Using historical and comparative methods, we study the past, present, and projected future of street food vending. Learn more about the City Food Research project »

Sponsoring Organization
Department of Nutrition and Food Studies

The NYC Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NYC HANES), modeled on the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, is a population-based, cross-sectional study with data collected from a physical examination and laboratory tests, as well as a face-to-face interview and an audio computer-assisted self-interview. The survey uses a probability sample of non-institutionalized adult New York City residents ages 20 years or older to provide representative citywide estimates of various health indicators.

Sponsoring Organization
NYU Langone - Department of Population Health +
NYC Department of Health & Mental Hygiene and

Family and Food Matters is a project that seeks to strengthen family relationships and promote physically healthy lifestyles within families impacted by food insecurity who draw on the services of Emergency Food Programs such as food pantries to fill gaps. An eight-week manualized curriculum, which meets two hours weekly, was collaboratively created by McSilver Institute staff, Community Collaborative Board members, and content knowledge experts.

Sponsoring Organization
McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research

The NYU Urban Farm Lab is an outdoor classroom, research lab, and community farm. It is a collaboration of faculty, staff, and students from the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies, NYU Steinhardt, NYU, Silver Towers Tenants, University Plaza Nursery School, and NYU Grounds. 

On the farm, students learn how to grow, care for, and harvest seasonal edible crops in an urban environment. The larger NYU community participates on the farm during farm volunteer days, class visits, and farm events.

Sponsoring Organization
NYU Steinhardt & NYU Sustainability

The Policing Lab @ NYU uses the tools of social science and data science to promote cost-effective public safety, with an awareness of both resource and social costs. We work with communities and law enforcement agencies to design studies that meet jurisdictions' needs, with the goal of developing data-driven criminal justice policies and analytic tools. Learn more about Public Safety Lab @ NYU »

Sponsoring Organization
FAS + School of Law

Stop-and-frisk, Arrest, and Incarceration and STI/HIV Risk in Minority MSM is a project motivated by the prospect of developing policies and prevention programs for minority men who have sex with men (MSM). This project uses computer simulation to model the impact of implementing policies to reduce criminal justice involvement (e.g. decarceration) and improve correctional settings (e.g. by improving ties to community support networks through reduced costs of prison calls) on HIV transmission in minority MSM and the larger population. Findings will inform evidence-based discussions about how to modify policy and programs to best improve well-being and reduce HIV risk in this highly vulnerable population.

Sponsoring Organization
NYU Langone - Department of Population Health's Division of Comparative Effectiveness and Decision Science

Funded by a $260,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Professor Jonathan Soffer of the Department of Technology, Culture, and Society at Tandon has digitized nearly 800,000 pages of the New York City Record, with data on nearly all the city's business transactions, hiring, regulations, zoning, and many other aspects of urban life, including statistics on death, taxes, and precinct-by-precinct election results. The database currently covers City Record issues from 1873, when the publication was started as a transparency measure after the Tweed scandals, to 1947. We are currently seeking funding to finish digitizing issues from 1948-2008, when the Record started to be issued in digital form. Search the database here>>

Sponsoring Organization
Tandon School of Engineering - Department of Technology, Culture, and Society

Taking aim at New Yorkers’ biggest civic complaint – noise – a team of scientists from NYU, working with collaborators at Ohio State University, have launched a first-of-its-kind comprehensive research initiative to understand and address noise pollution in New York and beyond.

The Sounds of New York City (SONYC) project – which involves large-scale noise monitoring – leverages the latest in machine learning technology, big data analysis, and citizen science reporting to more effectively monitor, analyze, and mitigate urban noise pollution.  

Sponsoring Organization
NYU Steinhardt and NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress

HEAL aims to develop and improve strategies that enhance healthcare value and advance population health by conducting and supporting applied research to help healthcare and community-based organizations deliver services that significantly improve outcomes.

Sponsoring Organization
NYU Langone - Department of Population Health's Division of Comparative Effectiveness and Decision Science

The Community Service Plan (CSP) focuses on preventing chronic diseases by reducing risk factors for obesity and cardiovascular disease and decreasing tobacco use and exposure to secondhand smoke, and on promoting healthy women, infants and children through parenting, early childhood and teen pregnancy prevention programs. The CSP is responsible for developing and implementing effective approaches to health promotion at the community level in early childhood settings and schools, primary care, housing, and community settings, such as faith-based organizations and social service providers.

Sponsoring Organization
NYU Langone - Department of Population Health's Division of Comparative Effectiveness and Decision Science

The mission of the Center for Innovation in Measuring Population Health (CIMPH) is to develop innovative surveillance methodology and break new grounds in collecting, analyzing, and distributing information on the heath profiles and social determinants of populations, particularly in urban settings, to guide resource allocation target policies and programs to affected populations and ultimately advance frontiers in knowledge regarding distributions and causes of disease.

Sponsoring Organization
NYU Langone - Department of Population Health's Division of Comparative Effectiveness and Decision Science

The Health Geographics Research Initiative is a group of academic faculty and research staff at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine who are focused on improving health by using geospatial analysis. Its researchers use big data approaches by leveraging large administrative claims and survey data to develop novel geographic methods for measuring disease burden at a local level. These methods have the power to transform the measurement of population health by identifying local communities with a high burden of disease and geographically targeting interventions to the places where they are needed most.

Sponsoring Organization
NYU Langone - Department of Population Health's Division of Comparative Effectiveness and Decision Science

An evidence-based program based at the Center for Early Childhood Health & Development, ParentCorps transforms the pre-K experience in historically disinvested neighborhoods by helping schools partner with families to build a future where all children thrive. ParentCorps includes three components: a social–emotional learning program in all pre-K classrooms; a parenting program for all families of pre-K students; and professional development for school leaders, pre-K teachers, mental health professionals, and parent support staff. The combination of these components strengthens ties between schools and families and helps both parents and teachers create safe, nurturing and predictable experiences for children – so that children develop the social, emotional and behavioral regulation skills that are foundational for learning and healthy development. Beginning with a pilot program in one public school in Harlem in 2000, ParentCorps now reaches more than 3,000 children and families in New York City, Corpus Christi, Texas, and Detroit, Michigan.

Sponsoring Organization
NYU Langone - Department of Population Health's Division of Comparative Effectiveness and Decision Science

The Policy and Environment Research Group uses advanced methodological techniques to better understand the ways physical and social environments shape people’s health and choices they make that impact their health. Through the use of big data such as administrative, city, and state records, they are able to examine the urban environment on a large scale. Their work uses publicly available data to understand connections between New York City public school children’s body mass index (BMI) and features of their home and school neighborhoods, including restaurants, food stores, parks, recreation facilities, walkability, crime rates, housing types, and more.

Sponsoring Organization
NYU Langone - Department of Population Health's Division of Comparative Effectiveness and Decision Science

The overarching goal of the CDC-funded NYU-CUNY Prevention Research Center (NYU-CUNY PRC) is to advance scalable community-clinical linkage models to reduce chronic disease disparities and improve access to care among hard-to-reach populations from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. Established in 2009 at NYU and expanded to include CUNY in 2014, the Center implements, evaluates, and disseminates a wide range of community-clinical linkage interventions, with a particular focus on community health worker (CHW) models that aim to provide a bridge for those with historically limited access to clinical care. The Center emphasizes collaborative, community-engaged research with multi-sector stakeholders and translation of research findings into sustainable and scalable policies and programs.

Sponsoring Organization
NYU Langone - Department of Population Health's Division of Comparative Effectiveness and Decision Science

As a part of the NYU Langone Health Community Health Needs Assessment/Community Service Plan, Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health for Arab and Asian Americans (REACH FAR) is an evidence-based program designed to prevent cardiovascular disease by increasing access to healthy foods and providing culturally tailored health coaching and messages. The program is being implemented in mosques on the Lower East Side and in Sunset Park. These sites are also implementing a program led by lay health workers to screen for breast and cervical cancer.

Sponsoring Organization
NYU Langone - Department of Population Health's Division of Comparative Effectiveness and Decision Science

NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) has implemented Relay, a novel program that engages and intervenes with individuals admitted to emergency departments (EDs) following an opioid-related overdose.  Relay provides services in the ED, followed by peer navigation for 90 days, with a goal of preventing subsequent overdose events. The Relay randomized controlled trial, conducted by NYU Langone’s Department of Population Health, will evaluate the effectiveness of Relay among participants presenting to one of five participating EDs.

Sponsoring Organization
NYU Langone - Department of Population Health's Division of Comparative Effectiveness and Decision Science

The Bellevue/NYU Occupational Environmental Medicine Clinic (BNOEMC) is an academically-based clinic situated within NYC Health+Hospitals Bellevue and NYU Grossman School of Medicine. The primary mission of the BNOEMC is to provide the highest quality clinical and preventive occupational medicine services to those workers in New York City who are at high risk for work-related diseases and most in need of these services, regardless of ability to pay. The BNOEMC works with community based organizations that assist with outreach and is part of the statewide Occupational Health Clinic Network funded by the NY State Department of Health.

Sponsoring Organization
NYU Langone - Department of Population Health's Division of Comparative Effectiveness and Decision Science

Effective tobacco cessation treatments exist for mental health patients, but smokers with mental health conditions encounter low rates of tobacco screening and treatment by psychiatrists. Dr. Erin Rogers leads the first evaluation of an opt-out approach to tobacco treatment in outpatient psychiatry, where patients are automatically enrolled into treatment by their psychiatric provider unless the patient declines. The project will evaluate the preliminary efficacy, provider perceptions, and barriers/facilitators to implementation of an opt-out approach to treating outpatient psychiatric patients for smoking.

Sponsoring Organization
NYU Langone - Department of Population Health's Division of Comparative Effectiveness and Decision Science

The study examines the prevalence of drug use, risk factors for use, and self-reported adverse outcomes associated with use, among nightclub and dance festival attendees. Hair testing is conducted at these venues to determine unintentional use of new psychoactive substances which may be adulterants in drugs such as ecstasy. Findings aim to detect risky drug trends and inform prevention information to be disseminated to the public and to those at highest risk.

Sponsoring Organization
NYU Langone - Department of Population Health's Division of Comparative Effectiveness and Decision Science

The Impact of Jail-Based Methadone on Overdose, Recidivism, HIV and Health Outcomes, and Costs in New York City, 2011-2017, is a project that links NYC jail electronic medical records with NYC and NYS administrative health databases in order to improve our understanding of the effects and benefits of methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) in a high-volume, high-turnover jail setting. Results from this project will better inform public health agencies and policy related to the US opioid epidemic and MMT’s impact on overdose, re-incarceration, HIV/AIDS, and related health and economic outcome data.

Sponsoring Organization
NYU Langone - Department of Population Health's Division of Comparative Effectiveness and Decision Science

The City Health Dashboard is an online data visualization tool that over the next two years will give hundreds of U.S. cities with populations of 70,000 or more the ability to more accurately identify some of their most pressing problems and take action. Users have the ability to view their city’s performance in key measures of health, like obesity and primary care physician coverage; and drivers of health status, such as housing affordability, high school graduation rate, food access, and opioid deaths. The City Health Dashboard adds a vital new resource for cities seeking to improve population health.

Sponsoring Organization
NYU Langone - Department of Population Health + Wagner Graduate School of Public Service + National Resource Network
(funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation)

The project seeks to demonstrate and evaluate SFHP implementation, compliance and enforcement in low-income multi-unit housing in the highest asthma prevalence areas of NYC and the nation, the South Bronx and Northern Manhattan.

Sponsoring Organization
NYU Langone - Department of Population Health