Current NYU Shanghai Global Research Initiatives Fellows

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai: March 30 - April 27

The purpose of Professor Ross’s  research stay at NYU Shanghai is to conduct research for a book on Population and Climate Change. The field of demography is responding to the challenges of climate change, and so government policy on immigration, migration, and sustainable population growth is overlapping frequently and inevitably with policies that address climate change mitigation and adaptation. East China is one of the five field sites he has chosen for a comparative study of regions, cities, and territories: the other four are Israel/Palestine, Scotland, Arizona, and New York City. The book will report on the lessons to be learned from each of these sites. China is still pivoting from its one-child policy, and facing considerable challenges in balancing a graying population against economic development quotas on the one hand, and meeting the goal of “ecological civilization” on the other. This makes it a particularly fertile case study for his project, and Shanghai’s area universities boast several centers and initiatives that are key sources of expertise. Residence at NYU Shanghai will afford him close access to these resources.

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 (September 15 - December 12)

John (Zhicheng) Fan is planning to finish another chapter of his dissertation on blame and forgiveness. On blame, Fan is interested in "writing someone off" as a response to wrongdoing. Fan argues that it is different from the kind of angry blame familiar in ethics, and that there are distinctive moral norms that apply to this response. Fan’s next chapter will focus on what it means to give someone another chance. Fan contrasts this form of reparative response to the kind of forgiveness more familiar from the Christian tradition, usually associated with the metaphor "wiping the slate clean." Importantly, to give another chance does not require wiping the slate clean, or overcoming anger or resentment toward the wrongdoer and the past wrong. Fan argues that apologies sometimes are not sufficient for forgiveness in the clean slate sense, even though they can be sufficient for giving the wrongdoer another chance. And while we are not always obligated to give wrongdoers another chance, we may have an imperfect duty to do so (in Kant's sense). This is because to refuse to give people second chances as a general policy is to see them as defined by their past wrongs. But this is incompatible with seeing them as agents who can learn from their mistakes and reform. Fan’s intuition is that forgiveness, in the clean slate sense, can be quite risky, and it may be dangerous to treat forgiveness as a virtue, as is usually done in Western culture. There are many good reasons why we shouldn't wipe the slate clean. But Fan wants to argue that society can and should encourage second chances, and that it is distinct from clean-slate forgiveness. If Fan has time, he plans to also work on the political and legal implications of this line of argument, especially how we should think about agential freedom and certain forms of punishment (such as the death penalty and life without parole).

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.