Current NYU Shanghai Global Research Initiatives Fellows

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai: October 23 - December 15

In Shanghai, Xinyi Zhang will be revising her manuscript of a research project “Who can(not) be Chinese and Why? The Construction of Symbolic Boundaries Against Immigrants in Chinese Online Discourse.” The paper uses social media data collected in 2020 from Sina Weibo and provides qualitative and computational content analysis on online discussion about loosening regulations on permanent residency in China. Zhang hopes to strengthen the paper by conducting additional literature review on racial discourse in China, using NYU Shanghai’s library. She also hopes to workshop her paper draft with scholars who focus on race and immigration in a global context in Shanghai.

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (June 16 - July 11):

Full of uncertainty and disorder, the Earth’s climate system is a unique subject in complex systems science. Reducing complex phenomena to simple laws is fascinating to Professor Yi Zhang as a scientist. Climate science also serves a more practical mission – to better prepare societies worldwide for the impact of climate change. Accurately predicting future changes in climate and extreme weather requires a fundamental understanding of underlying physical mechanisms. Professor Zhang is interested in atmospheric dynamics and the interaction between dynamics, thermodynamics, and radiative transfer. Professor Zhang particularly appreciates the insights that analytical theories provide, whether they are predictive or diagnostic. Achieving quantitative agreement with simple theories can be challenging in our complex climate system, but Professor Zhang strives to incorporate analytical components in each piece of her research.
This summer, Professor Zhang is planning to work on extreme heat related research. Professor Zhang previously derived an upper bound for air temperature during heat waves based on fundamental laws of atmospheric dynamics and thermodynamics. While this scaling has broad applicability across midlatitude regions, it does not work as effectively in every region. The Eastern China plain is a particularly interesting case in terms of meteorology, being affected by the deflected jet stream by the Tibetan Plateau. The severe heat waves in 2022 was considered the worst in a hundred years. Understanding the meteorological conditions that permits events of this strength to occur is highly essential for estimating the occurrence probability of this type of events in a changing climate due to anthropogenic warming and natural variabilities.
 

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (September 13 - December 17)：

Guanchun Li is currently working on his dissertation, focused on the modeling molecular and cellular mechanism of LTP (long term potentiation) for CA1 pyramidal neurons in the hippocampus, which is thought to be the core mechanism in learning and memory in the brain. He has helped develop a computational model of the phosphorylation of CaMKII, a chemical which senses and integrates the calcium signal and is a star player of the LTP. It is similar to computational models in the literature but more simplistic and math solid and performs well qualitatively well with respect to the dynamics of the phosphorylated state of CaMKII observed in the literature. He is now extending the model into a compartmental model, which could describe the spatiotemporal dynamics of calcium signal more detaily, which is thought to encode the information stream to be learned. With the completion of the full dynamic model, he is expected to provide a biologically detailed model of plasticity change during the formation of place cells in CA1, which is a representative experiment case in the study of learning in the brain.

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (September 13 - December 17)：

Kaizhe Wang will construct a thermal convection system to study enhanced heat transport and fluid-structure interaction in Rayleigh Benard convection. By introducing moving boundaries in Rayleigh Benard thermal convection, he hopes to find how such conditions affect the overall transport characteristics. He also looks forward to studying the interplay between a rotating "wind vane" and the large-scale circulation in thermal convection, investigating how they interact with each other. By changing the size of the vane and the strength of thermal convection, different phenomenons may appear. These experiments will be conducted in the Applied Math Lab in Shanghai. Apart from the thermal convection research, Wang will also finish writing some papers about the earlier project on open siphons and Feynman sprinklers.

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (September 13 - December 12) :

Shiyuan Hu is working on two projects at NYU Shanghai. The first one is to improve the heat transport efficiency in Rayleigh-Benard convection. The second one is the design of low Reynolds number mechanical swimmers. Both projects require the lab resources at NYU-ECNU joint fluid lab.