Current NYU Shanghai Global Research Initiatives Fellows

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai: February 5 - April 6

Zhen Zhang plans to use the time and resources at NYU Shanghai to complete the final stage of work for the large-scale volume, Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas, for which she serves as the commissioned editor-in-chief. Zhang also plans to spend part of the stay on her own ongoing book project, The Orphan Imagination in Sinophone Film History and a creative mixed media project on family archive as collective memory. In addition to library research and media archiving/preservation (availing the IMA resources on campus), Zhang plans to meet local film scholars and filmmakers for the volume and book projects, and interview family members and friends for the creative project, and composing some section drafts.

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai: January 15 - March 1

“Jiqiren/robots” as a techno-scientific solution has become a keyword for the Chinese government, scientists, robotics entrepreneurs, elderly Chinese, and their families concerned with China’s aging issue and care crisis. Shuting Li’s research project aims to examine the entanglement of aging, care, family reconfiguration, and modernization in the development of robotic technology in post-reform China. As one of the four municipalities, Shanghai represents the diversity of social and cultural lives in contemporary China. The myriad of elders living in Shanghai will provide Li with a point to observe tensions between the traditional and the modern, between the urban and the countryside. Shanghai has become one of the pilot cities for the implementation of new eldercare policies and for the testing of the innovative technology used to satisfy the needs of the increasing population of elders.

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (July 8 - July 26):

Professor Siwei Cheng’s research project, "Inequality and Connectedness," combines daily mobility data collected via mobile device and the American Community Survey to create comprehensive measures of activity space segregation across geographic areas in the United States. The project extends conventional measures of spatial segregation to incorporate exposure in individuals' routine activities, weighted by the flows of individuals between census block groups. At NYU Shanghai, several scholars and research teams are collecting similar data to understand communities in urban China. Professor Cheng looks forward to the opportunity to connect with these scholars and engage in a broader conversation about inequality and connectedness in the global context.

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (May 26 - July 25):

During his summer GRI fellowship, Professor Mingzhen Lu will collaborate with Prof. Kangning Huang to investigate the spatial mismatch between China’s rapidly growing urban populations and their built environments—a phenomenon marked by both “ghost towns” and overcrowded urban villages. The project involves three core objectives:

1. Mapping Urban Infrastructure and Population:

They will map building volumes in 100 Chinese cities by processing remote sensing data from sources like Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, PALSAR, VIIRS, and SRTM. A machine learning model (Random Forest regression) will estimate building heights, validated against real-world data. In parallel, they will use mobile phone signal data to construct probabilistic maps of population distribution via a Voronoi tessellation approach. Overlaying these layers will reveal mismatches between infrastructure and population density.

2. Analyzing Temporal Trends:

By extending the mapping techniques over multiple years, they will create time series analyses that capture changes in building age-structure and track population migration patterns. These dynamic maps will help model trends in material flows, highlighting how urban development imbalances have evolved—exemplified by rising Gini coefficients in building volumes.

3. Developing Predictive Ecological Models:

They will adapt ecological models to urban building demographics, establishing age cohorts and determining survival and maintenance rates. This framework will simulate future urban trajectories, predicting construction demands, demolition waste, and related emissions. These predictions aim to guide policy on waste management and sustainable urban planning.

Ultimately, their work will produce openly accessible maps, novel analytical tools, and multiple academic publications, while enhancing our understanding of urbanization dynamics with broad applications for cities undergoing rapid growth.

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (July 7 - July 25):

Professor Zhihua An’s research project studies the crystal bending in melt-processed coumarin derivatives. Coumarin 102 is a coumarin derivative with a donor, bridge and acceptor moieties synthesized as an excellent low-cost alternative to conventional photovoltaics. Growing melt-processed thin crystal films of coumarin 102, we have observed the toroidal bent crystals formed on the spherulitic, or radially grown, straight crystals by polarized optical microscopy.  The crystal structure was determined as P21/c by X-ray powder diffraction. The temperature dependence of the crystal structure and the size of the toroid was investigated. The growth behavior and the optical properties were also observed under polarized optical microscope and Mueller matrix microscope. These toroidal bent structures of coumarin 102 exhibit opposite bending directions with 50% going clockwise and counterclockwise randomly. Moreover, we have discovered that the fluorescence intensity of the bending crystal fibers is nearly twice stronger than the straight crystal fibers. These observations suggest that studying crystal bending beyond a single crystal may be another strategy to reveal crystallization mechanisms and develop new functional materials with structures that can improve the performance of optoelectronic devices.