For NYU undergraduates interested in research, gaining experience in the field, the lab, or the studio can take several forms. Across the University, NYU students participate in research projects that are, quite frankly, changing the world.
Few of the students profiled below started college imagining that they’d soon be working side-by-side with professors and PhD candidates. But they were surprised to find what doors opened to them when they took initiative and moved their exploration beyond the classroom. Where their academic curiosity led, opportunities followed.
The following students are a tiny sampling of the undergraduate researchers with impressive work underway at NYU. Want to learn more about these projects? Check out the original story.
How Does Realism Impact Human Emotions in Virtual Reality?
During their junior year at NYU Abu Dhabi, Aya Amine and Nourhane Sekkat set out to understand how much the level of realism in virtual reality (VR) settings impacts human emotions. “We look at it through a mental health lens, focused on two states: calmness and anxiety,” explains Aya. She’s double majoring in Interactive Media and Legal Studies. “We built four different VR worlds for 10 participants to experience, then we collected data about their emotional reactions to each.”
Each of the simulated worlds had different levels of realism. Some were more cartoonish while some felt more realistic. There were calm simulations and spooky simulations. With this in mind, Aya and Nourhane measured and compared the participants’ reactions to each world.
“Working on this makes me excited about the possibilities for VR,” says Nourhane, an Interactive Media major. “I’m from Morocco, and I’d like to take what I’ve learned back home. VR is not a big thing there yet. I feel like it’s an untapped market with so many opportunities, from education to therapy to entertainment to marketing.”
Aya adds, “The best advice we received while working on this project came from our professor Domna Banakou. She told us to always keep the human experience top of mind. It’s easy to get excited about making VR look super cool with features like 3D models. But at the end of the day, what matters most is how it makes a person feel.”
That’s Not a Partisan Feeling, That’s Patriotic
Students at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development Verbatim Performance Lab (VPL) create verbatim documentary theatre performances that disrupt political, cultural, and social narratives. Olivia Qian, an Educational Theatre major at Steinhardt, played a key role in the VPL’s latest project, That’s Not a Partisan Feeling—That’s Patriotic. The project is an interview-based work focusing on the 2024 presidential election. “It’s meant to lead audiences to a better understanding of what people living and working in the United States expect from a president,” explains Olivia. “We have a large age range represented, from 18 to 89 years old. And it’s interesting to hear their differing opinions about political parties.”
Olivia had the opportunity to interview subjects, then study their words and gestures to create a transcript that “replicates them exactly,” she says. “For example, when we hear a pause, we use a hard return on the keyboard. When we bring in actors to perform the transcripts, sometimes we will flip the race or the gender or the person speaking to see how that impacts audiences’ perceptions of their words.”
Olivia worked alongside the VPL director Joe Salvatore on the project. Salvatore is also clinical professor of educational theatre and vice chair for academic affairs at Steinhardt.
“Since working with Professor Salvatore, I’ve grown as a critical thinker,” Olivia adds. “I thought I wanted to teach theatre, but I’ve been thinking more about how theatre itself has teaching power, depending on how we structure a performance and what tools we use to prompt audience reactions.”
Advancing Polymer Science and Its Impact on Health Care
During Sue Li’s junior year, she took a polymeric materials class with NYU Tandon School of Engineering Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Nathalie Pinkerton. Inspired by what she was learning in Professor Pinkerton’s class, Sue decided to join her lab.
“It’s satisfying when I can apply things that I learned from class to our research, like the encapsulation of nanoparticles and understanding how they assemble,” says Sue. “And it’s such a friendly atmosphere in the lab. We’re all collaborating and encouraging each other.”
It was through this collaboration that she met Zaq Ponce, a first-year student whose common interest in these materials led him to cold email Professor Pinkerton. Both Sue and Zaq are Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering majors at NYU Tandon, and they’re both interested in doing work that has a significant impact on health. Professor Pinkerton’s lab gave them the opportunity to do just that.
“We create these very, very tiny materials called polymeric core-shell nanoparticles,” explains Zaq. “They’re mainly used to deliver medicines to the body, as well as in bioimaging and diagnosis. My work in the lab is focused on how to improve the manufacturing process of nanoparticles.” Zaq’s project is titled: Optimized Co-Encapsulation of Colloidal Nanocrystals and Small Molecules into Polymeric Nanoparticles via Sequential Nanoprecipitation.
“My work centers around improving drug delivery efficiency through novel polymer design and observing the nano-bio interactions,” explains Sue. “For example, this would help with precision medicine in things like chemotherapy.” Her research project is titled: Assembling Neural Endosome Targeted Nanoparticles for Pain Drug Delivery via Flash NanoPrecipitation.
This story was originally published on October 31, 2024, and written by Eileen Reynolds and Carly Thompson. You can read it in its original, full version here.
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