Research News
New 3D flood visualizations help communities understand rising water risks
As climate change intensifies extreme weather, two new NYU studies show 3D flood visualizations developed by a cross-institutional research team dramatically outperform traditional maps for communicating risk.
When Sunset Park, Brooklyn residents compared both formats that visualized flooding, 92% preferred the dynamic 3D approach.
"The challenge we face is that substantial sectors of the population ignore flood warnings and fail to evacuate," said Professor Debra F. Laefer, the NYU Tandon School of Engineering senior researcher involved in both studies who holds appointments in the Civil and Urban Engineering Department and in the Center for Urban Science + Progress (CUSP). "Our findings suggest dynamic 3D visualizations could significantly improve how we communicate these life-threatening risks."
A Laefer-led team from NYU Tandon and NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development — with colleagues from University College Dublin and Queen’s University Belfast — developed a low-cost visualization method that transforms LiDAR scans of urban streets into immersive flood simulations, detailed in a paper called "Low-Cost, LiDAR-Based, Dynamic, Flood Risk Communication Viewer” published in Remote Sensing.
Under leadership of Tandon and Steinhardt researchers, the team evaluated these visualizations in a second paper, "From 2D to 3D: Flood risk communication in a flood-prone neighborhood via dynamic, isometric street views," published in Progress in Disaster Science. This study compared visualization methods for a Category 3 hurricane scenario: a conventional NOAA flood map versus a 3D simulation showing water rising to three feet at the intersection of 4th Avenue and 36th in Sunset Park.
The results were stark. Not only did participants overwhelmingly prefer the 3D visualization, but 100% found it more authoritative than the traditional map, with a significantly better understanding of evacuation challenges.
What makes this approach innovative is its computational efficiency. Unlike existing systems that require powerful hardware, it decouples flood prediction from visualization, allowing operation on standard computers.
"We achieved this using a Potree viewer coupled with Inkscape to create dynamic flood water flow," Laefer notes. "Our study didn't require a graphics card — just a single, quad-core processor."
The visualization includes realistic water movement created through compounding sine wave functions, with algorithms controlling transparency, color, and flow speed.
"One of the most rewarding aspects was seeing how participants instantly grasped the flood severity without technical explanations," said Kshitij Chandna, a master’s student advised by Laefer at the time of the research, who is the co-author on both studies. "When someone looks at a 3D simulation and says 'I would need to evacuate,' you know you've successfully communicated risk in a way traditional maps cannot."
For Sunset Park's immigrant community, many facing language barriers, the intuitive 3D visualization proved particularly valuable. Participants described it as "more realistic," "clearer," and "more visual" than traditional maps.
The implications extend beyond flood visualization. The researchers have already demonstrated visualizing water flowing through pipes and are exploring applications for other types of flooding.
As climate change increases flooding frequency, this research suggests dynamic 3D visualization could bridge the gap between abstract warnings and concrete actions needed to save lives.
The Remote Sensing paper's authors are Laefer, Chandna, Evan O'Keeffe, Kim Hertz (NYU Tandon); Jing Zhu and Raul Lejano (NYU Steinhardt); Anh Vo and Michela Bertolotto (University College Dublin); and Ulrich Ofterdinger (Queen's University Belfast). The Progress in Disaster Science paper was authored by Zhu, Laefer, Lejano, Peter Gmelch (NYU Tandon), O'Keeffe, and Chandna.
The United States National Science Foundation provided funding for this research, which builds upon Laefer's pioneering work in LiDAR and remote sensing technologies for urban applications.
Jing Zhu, Debra F. Laefer, Raul P. Lejano, Peter Gmelch, Evan O'Keeffe, Kshitij Chandna, From 2D to 3D: Flood risk communication in a flood-prone neighborhood via dynamic, isometric street views, Progress in Disaster Science, Volume 26, 2025, 100419, ISSN 2590-0617, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pdisas.2025.100419.
Novel technique boosts cadmium telluride solar cell performance by 13 percent
An NYU Tandon-led research team has developed a novel technique to significantly enhance the performance of cadmium telluride (CdTe) solar cells. Unlike conventional silicon panels that use thick layers of silicon, these solar cells use a simpler, less expensive approach — depositing an ultra-thin layer of cadmium and tellurium compounds onto glass.
This thinner design reduces manufacturing costs while helping the cells maintain their efficiency at high temperatures and in low-light conditions. Though less common than traditional silicon panels — the familiar dark blue or black panels seen on rooftops — CdTe solar cells are an emerging technology primarily used in utility-scale solar farms, currently accounting for about 40% of U.S. large-scale solar installations.
A persistent challenge with these cells, however, has been damage that occurs during a critical manufacturing step — when the metal wiring is added to collect electricity from the cell. The high-temperature process of applying these metal contacts can damage the material, particularly at the boundaries where microscopic crystal regions meet, like weak points between tiles in a mosaic. This damage creates barriers that reduce the cell's power output.
In research published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, the team found that applying an ultra-thin oxide coating — either aluminum gallium oxide (AlGaOx) or silicon oxide (SiOx) — before adding metal contacts like gold prevents this damage. The coating naturally collects at these vulnerable boundaries between crystal regions, protecting them while leaving the rest of the surface clear for electrical contact.
This simple and scalable solution has led to major improvements in the cells' electrical output, increasing the maximum voltage they can produce by 13% and boosting their overall power generation.
"Silicon solar cells are rated at room temperature, but their performance drops as temperatures rise. You don't have that problem with CdTe cells, which makes them particularly valuable in warmer regions like the Caribbean or near the equator," said André Taylor, an NYU Tandon professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and one of the paper’s authors. The paper’s corresponding author is B. Edward Sartor, who was a doctoral student in Taylor's lab when the study was conducted.
With the protective layer in place, the open-circuit voltage of the solar cells increased from 750 to 850 millivolts. The fill factor, another key efficiency metric, also improved, provided the oxide layer remained thin enough to avoid increasing electrical resistance.
"The AlGaOx layer protects the cell when you're evaporating the gold contacts, which come in at high temperature and condense on the surface. Without this protection, you damage the interface and create defects that lower device performance," Taylor explained.
The oxide layer is applied through a simple spin-coating process, a widely used technique in semiconductor manufacturing that allows precise control over coverage. The researchers also found that the method works with different metal contacts, including gold and molybdenum, and that it shows potential benefits when combined with zinc telluride nitrogen-doped (ZnTe:N) buffer layers, which help facilitate the movement of positive charge carriers (holes) in the solar cell.
"This discovery suggests a promising path to make CdTe solar cells more efficient and reliable,” said Taylor. “It's a straightforward adjustment to existing manufacturing processes that could potentially advance solar energy production."
The research comes at a critical time for U.S. solar manufacturing. After losing the silicon solar cell market to China, CdTe technology offers a strategic opportunity to rebuild domestic manufacturing capabilities, with companies like First Solar leading the way. The technology also offers a unique sustainability angle: tellurium, a key ingredient, can be extracted from copper mining operations, where it was previously considered a waste material, potentially creating new economic value.
Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Solar Energy Technologies Office, this research adds to Taylor's diverse solar technology portfolio. His research group has explored multiple solar cell technologies, including polymers, small molecule solar cells, and hybrid cells combining carbon nanotubes with silicon. The group previously introduced the world's first Förster Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET)-based solar cell and continues to advance research in emerging technologies like perovskite solar cells.
Sartor, B. E., Muzzio, R., Jiang, C.-S., Lee, C., Perkins, C. L., Taylor, A. D., & Reese, M. O. (2025). Selective Isolation of Surface Grain Boundaries by Oxide Dielectrics Improves Cd(Se,Te) Device Performance. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 17(5), 7641–7647. doi:10.1021/acsami.4c16902
Sophisticated data analysis uncovers how city living disrupts ADHD's path to obesity
A hidden link between impulsivity and obesity may not be fixed in human biology but shaped by the cities we live in.
Using a novel engineering-based approach, researchers from NYU Tandon School of Engineering and Italy's Istituto Superiore di Sanità found that attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) contributes to obesity not only directly through known biological pathways but also indirectly, by reducing physical activity. The findings are published in PLOS Complex Systems.
Obesity prevalence is also influenced by other city-level variables, such as access to mental health services and food insecurity, thereby opening the door to potential mitigation strategies.
To uncover the nexus between ADHD and obesity, the research team applied urban scaling laws — a mathematical framework from complexity science — to public health data from 915 U.S. cities. Urban scaling describes how features of cities change with population size, similar to how biological traits scale with body size.
They found that both ADHD and obesity decrease sublinearly with population: as cities grow, per-capita prevalence declines. Meanwhile, access to mental health providers and college education rises superlinearly, increasing faster than city size. Larger cities, it seems, offer not just more services, but disproportionately more support for conditions linked to impulsivity.
But size alone doesn’t tell the full story. To reveal where cities over- or underperform relative to expectations, the researchers used Scale-Adjusted Metropolitan Indicators (SAMIs). SAMIs measure how much a city deviates from what urban scaling would predict — highlighting, for example, when a small city has unusually low obesity rates or when a large one falls short on mental health access. These deviations became the foundation for a causal analysis.
"Urban scaling and causal discovery methods allow us to see relationships that traditional health research might miss," explains Maurizio Porfiri, senior author on the PLOS paper. Porfiri is an NYU Tandon Institute Professor with appointments in the Departments of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Civil and Urban Engineering, and Technology Management and Innovation. He also serves as Director of the NYU Center for Urban Science + Progress (CUSP).
"Without accounting for how city size naturally affects health metrics, we’d misattribute success or failure to the wrong factors. By filtering out these population effects first, we can identify the true causal pathways linking ADHD to obesity — and more importantly, how urban environments modify these relationships,” adds Tian Gan, Ph.D. student in Mechanical Engineering at NYU Tandon. Simone Macrì, senior scientist at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Rome, further comments that “This approach reveals precise intervention points that wouldn’t be apparent otherwise"
Using SAMIs, the team mapped a network of interrelated variables: ADHD prevalence led to higher physical inactivity, which in turn increased obesity. Access to mental health care helped reduce inactivity, indirectly lowering obesity risk. Higher prevalence of college education correlated with better mental health access and more physical activity.
This causal map revealed a dynamic system in which impulsivity, health behaviors, and urban infrastructure interact — and cities themselves either reinforce or weaken these effects.
These patterns weren’t uniform. When the researchers mapped SAMIs by region, cities in the Southeastern and Southwestern U.S. consistently showed greater disparities. Neighboring cities often displayed striking differences in ADHD and obesity prevalence, mental health access, and food insecurity — suggesting that local policy, culture, and resources may either amplify or buffer these behavioral health risks.
“Regional averages can mask a lot of variation,” Porfiri said. “The SAMIs let us see which cities are punching above or below their weight. It’s not just about how big a city is — it’s about how it uses its resources. With this kind of insight, policymakers can target investments in mental health care, education, and physical activity to break the link between ADHD and obesity where it's strongest.”
To validate the findings at a more granular level, the team analyzed data from over 19,000 children across the U.S. from the National Survey of Children’s Health. The same causal patterns held: children with more severe ADHD were more likely to be obese, especially when physical activity and household education were low.
The study follows earlier work by Porfiri and collaborators using urban scaling to explore firearm ownership and gun violence across U.S. cities. That research revealed that New York City, despite its large size, significantly outperforms expectations on public safety—underscoring how city-level deviations can challenge assumptions about scale and risk.
In addition to Porfiri, Gan, and Macrì, Rayan Succar, a doctoral candidate in Mechanical Engineering working under Porfiri’s advisement, is also an author on the paper.
The research was supported by funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme.
Gan T, Succar R, Macrì S, Porfiri M (2025) Investigating the link between impulsivity and obesity through urban scaling laws. PLOS Complex Syst 2(5): e0000046. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcsy.0000046
Mapping a new brain network for naming
How are we able to recall a word we want to say? This basic ability, called word retrieval, is often compromised in patients with brain damage. Interestingly, many patients who can name words they see, like identifying a pet in the room as a “cat”, struggle with retrieving words in everyday discourse.
Scientists have long sought to understand how the brain retrieves words during speech. A new study by researchers at New York University sheds light on this mystery, revealing a left-lateralized network in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that plays a crucial role in naming. The findings, published in Cell Reports, provide new insights into the neural architecture of language, offering potential applications for both neuroscience and clinical interventions.
Mapping the Brain’s Naming Network
Word retrieval is a fundamental aspect of human communication, allowing us to link concepts to language. Despite decades of research, the exact neural dynamics underlying this process — particularly in natural auditory contexts — remain poorly understood.
NYU researchers — led by Biomedical Engineering Graduate Student Leyao Yu and Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at NYU Tandon and Neurology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine Adeen Flinker — recorded electrocorticographic (ECoG) data from 48 neurosurgical patients to examine the spatial and temporal organization of language processing in the brain. By using unsupervised clustering techniques, the researchers identified two distinct but overlapping networks responsible for word retrieval. The first, a semantic processing network, was located in the middle and inferior frontal gyri. This network was engaged in integrating meaning and was sensitive to how surprising a word was within a given sentence. The second, an articulatory planning network, was situated in the inferior frontal and precentral gyri, which played a crucial role in speech production, regardless of whether words were presented visually or auditorily.
Auditory Naming and the Prefrontal Cortex
The study builds upon decades of work in language neuroscience. Previous research suggested that different regions of the brain were responsible for retrieving words depending on whether they were seen or heard. However, earlier studies relied on methods with limited temporal resolution, leaving many unanswered questions about how these networks interact in real time.
By leveraging the high spatial and temporal resolution of ECoG, the researchers uncovered a striking ventral-dorsal gradient in the prefrontal cortex. They found that while articulatory planning was localized ventrally, semantic processing was uniquely represented in a dorsal region of the inferior frontal gyrus and middle frontal gyrus — a previously underappreciated hub for language processing.
"These findings suggest that a missing piece in our understanding of language processing lies in this dorsal prefrontal region," explains lead author Leyao Yu. "Our study provides the first direct evidence that this area is involved in mapping sounds to meaning in an auditory context."
Implications for Neuroscience and Medicine
The study has far-reaching implications, not only for theoretical neuroscience but also for clinical applications. Language deficits, such as anomia — the inability to retrieve words — are common in stroke, brain injury, and neurodegenerative disorders. Understanding the precise neural networks involved in word retrieval could lead to better diagnostics and targeted rehabilitation therapies for patients suffering from these conditions.
Additionally, the study provides a roadmap for future research in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and neuroprosthetics. By decoding the neural signals associated with naming, scientists could potentially develop assistive devices for individuals with speech impairments, allowing them to communicate more effectively through direct brain-computer communication.
For now, one thing is clear: our ability to name the world around us is not just a simple act of recall, but the result of a sophisticated and finely tuned neural system — one that is now being revealed in greater detail than ever before.
Yu, L., Dugan, P., Doyle, W., Devinsky, O., Friedman, D., & Flinker, A. (2025). A left-lateralized dorsolateral prefrontal network for naming. Cell Reports, 44(5), 115677. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2025.115677
"Rivalry as a Craft": NYU study reveals how writers compete with AI
Writers are not passive victims of AI disruption but active crafters of their professional futures, according to new research from New York University presented at The ACM CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Yokohama, Japan.
Generative AI technologies are transforming the writing profession, eliciting opposing reactions. "If I let AI do my work, it would make me miserable inside," one screenwriter told researchers, while a paralegal countered, "individuals who are not using it are at a serious disadvantage."
The study was overseen by NYU Tandon's Oded Nov (Morton L. Topfer Professor of Technology Management) with lead author Rama Adithya Varanasi (Postdoctoral Researcher at NYU Tandon) and Batia Mishan Wiesenfeld (Professor of Management at NYU Stern). The team interviewed 25 professional writers with an average of 17 years of experience, all with at least 12 months of exposure to generative AI.
Using 'job crafting' theory, which examines how workers redesign their roles to derive greater meaning from their work, the researchers identified four distinct strategies that writing professionals employ in response to generative AI — two focused on resistance and two on adoption.
- Human-driven expansion (AI Resisters): Writers strengthen their identity by making their human labor visible, building personal brands, and forming collaborations.
- Human-driven localization (AI Resisters): Writers create niche identities, appeal to selective audiences that value human work, and sometimes reduce quality to compete with AI's speed.
- Generative AI-driven expansion (AI Adopters): Writers use AI to enhance creative workflows, generate alternatives, overcome blocks, and assist with challenging communications.
- Generative AI-driven delegation (AI Adopters): Writers offload tedious tasks to AI, reduce emotional labor, and minimize dependencies on colleagues.
The research uncovered significant evidence of "AI rivalry" among some resistors — professionals actively competing against AI rather than simply avoiding it. Writers employing resistance strategies deliberately target what they perceive as AI's weaknesses, such as its limited ability to generate content specific to a geographic area, community, or context.
"I'm taking steps to be more independent," one SEO writer shared. "I have started 11 websites. The baking website is my best contender." Many writers are creating revenue streams where they own the content, anticipating industry disruption.
Meanwhile, adopters engage in significant "AI managerial labor" — the invisible work of designing prompts, cleaning outputs, and verifying results. This requires substantial workflow changes, as one paralegal noted: "With ChatGPT, I need to block two to three hours to complete the prompting... If I leave it mid-way... it is extremely difficult to follow the reasoning."
Economic implications loom large, as some senior professionals eliminated dependencies on junior writers. "The difference now is that I'm not dealing with a lot of writers; I'm not giving them therapy sessions," said one publishing house owner who replaced staff with ChatGPT.
A key distinction emerged: resisters shape both identities and practices, while adopters focus primarily on practices without significant identity work. This stems from AI's anthropomorphizing features, which some writers perceive as competing with their creative identities.
Varanasi emphasized: "Resistors engage holistically in their human potential to shape both identity and practices... We introduced the notion of AI rivalry to show resistors engaged in constructive strategies while viewing generative AI as a rival similar to how they would treat a human rival."
The researchers recommend creating communities where resisters and embracers can share insights, as both groups would benefit from understanding each other's approaches to navigating this technological transformation.
The research was supported by funding from the National Science Foundation.
Varanasi, R., Wiesenfeld, B. & Nov, O. AI Rivalry as a Craft: How Resisting and Embracing Generative AI Are Reshaping the Writing Profession. 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (1198). https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3714035
AI vision system reveals bird wings evolved for heat regulation, not just flight
For centuries, scientists have observed that animals in warmer climates have longer limbs — a pattern known as Allen's Rule. Long attributed to the need to maintain body temperature, the precise mechanism that gave rise to this pattern has remained poorly understood.
A new computer vision system has now confirmed this principle applies to bird wings too, reshaping our understanding of the evolution of bird wings to include the demands of temperature regulation in addition to flight mechanics.
Published in Global Ecology and Biogeography, the study represents the culmination of a six-year collaboration between ecologists and computer scientists at the University of Michigan and New York University.
The team's system, "Skelevision," uses artificial intelligence to automatically identify and measure bird bones from photographs. "We use a deep neural network to detect individual bones in specimen images, identify their type, and create a precise digital outline of each one," explained David Fouhey, one of the paper's senior authors and assistant professor in NYU Tandon School of Engineering and NYU's Courant Institute. "Along with the co-designed hardware, we’re able to reduce 3D measurement to a 2D task, in which current computer vision systems excel."
Before this technology, researchers tended to study skeletal traits in relatively small sample sizes. The laborious process required manually handling fragile bones and measuring each element with calipers, creating a bias toward more easily measured external traits.
"Collecting skeletal measurements on a large scale lets us answer big questions about how species evolve and interact with their environments," explained Brian Weeks, lead author and assistant professor at the University of Michigan's School for Environment and Sustainability.
The researchers designed and built a complete end-to-end system for analyzing bird skeletons — developing both the physical imaging hardware with a high-resolution camera positioned above a surface where bird bones are arranged, and the sophisticated AI software that analyzes these photographs to identify and measure individual bones.
This integrated hardware-software approach reduces specimen handling time from 15-30 minutes to about one minute each. The methodology was established in a 2023 paper in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, demonstrating Skelevision's accuracy across 12,450 bird specimens.
This efficiency allowed researchers to analyze wing-bone measurements from 1,520 species of passerine birds across 80 families from all continents except Antarctica. The specimens came primarily from the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, and the dataset has since been supplemented with specimens from Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History.
"Wing bones play a unique role in thermoregulation," explained Weeks. "When birds fly, these bones become crucial for dissipating the enormous heat generated by flight muscles. This suggests the pattern we're seeing — longer wing bones in warmer climates — is driven primarily by the need for efficient cooling rather than heat conservation. Even traits as critical as wings, which we've traditionally studied only for flight mechanics, are being shaped by thermoregulation demands. This has important implications for how birds might respond to climate change."
The technology is now being expanded with an advanced 3D scanning system to measure additional properties like volume and surface area. The researchers have also released their dataset and open-source code.
In addition to Weeks and Fouhey, the paper's authors are Christina Harvey from University of California Davis; Joseph A. Tobias from Imperial College London; Catherine Sheard from University of Bristol; and Zhizhuo Zhou from University of Michigan and Carnegie Mellon University.
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation provided funding for the research.
Weeks, B., Harvey, C., Tobias, J., Sheard, C., Zhou, Z. & Fouhey, D., (2025). Longer Wing Bones in Warmer Climates Suggest a Role of Thermoregulation in Bird Wing Evolution. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 34(4) .https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.70033
NYU Tandon-led research team wins distinguished paper award for gittuf security system
A research team led by NYU Tandon School of Engineering Professor Justin Cappos has won a Distinguished Paper Award at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium 2025 for developing a security system that prevents unauthorized code changes in Git repositories.
The paper, "Rethinking Trust in Forge-Based Git Security," addresses critical vulnerabilities in an era of surging software supply chain attacks. It presents a new system, called gittuf, that decentralizes security responsibilities typically handled by centralized platforms like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket. These Git forges have become the backbone of modern software development but represent a single point of trust in the security landscape.
"For most security properties, users can't verify independently that a forge is enforcing policy correctly," said Cappos, who holds an appointment in NYU Tandon's Computer Science and Engineering Department and is on the faculty of the NYU Center for Cybersecurity. "One of the main challenges was providing strong security guarantees while being backwards compatible with forges."
Recent years have seen high-profile attacks targeting centralized code repositories. For example, in 2021, attackers compromised the PHP programming language's Git server to insert malicious code. Similar incidents that used trusted developers’ compromised forge credentials have affected the Gentoo Linux distribution and various open-source projects.
The gittuf system decentralizes three critical aspects of Git security: policy declaration, activity tracking, and policy enforcement. This means that even if attackers compromise a central Git forge, they would need to compromise multiple developers' cryptographic keys to make unauthorized changes without detection.
"The beauty of our approach is that a single honest developer with gittuf can detect and correct policy violations," said Aditya Sirish A Yelgundhalli, a Ph.D. candidate in Cappos' Secure Systems Lab and the paper's lead author. "This dramatically raises the bar for attackers."
The system works through an authenticated, append-only log called the Reference State Log that records all repository activity with cryptographically signed entries. If someone detects a policy violation, they can mark the invalid entry and restore the repository to its last valid state. The system also supports requiring multiple developers to approve changes to critical code and works with existing Git servers.
The gittuf project is currently an OpenSSF sandbox project hosted by the Linux Foundation. Projects hosted by the OpenSSF and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation are already using it, and Bloomberg is piloting the system.
gittuf builds on security principles from The Update Framework (TUF), also developed in Cappos’ lab. While TUF secures software update systems, gittuf adapts concepts like delegations and threshold approvals specifically for Git repositories.
In addition to Cappos and Yelgundhalli, Patrick Zielinski, another Ph.D. student in Cappos’s lab and Reza Curtmola, a professor in the Department of Computer Science at New Jersey Institute of Technology, are authors on the paper. The research was supported by three National Science Foundation grants: CNS 2247829, CNS 2054692, and DGE 2043104.
A. Yelgundhalli, P. Zielinski, R. Curtmola, J. Cappos. 2025. Rethinking Trust in Forge-Based Git Security. The Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium. San Diego, CA, USA
A new approach to asthma treatment: Harnessing the liver to reprogram the immune system
For millions of people around the world, asthma is more than just a breathing problem — it is a chronic and often debilitating condition caused by the immune system's exaggerated response to harmless airborne particles.
Traditional treatments like inhaled steroids and bronchodilators help manage symptoms but fail to address the underlying cause: the immune system's misdirected attack on respiratory allergens.
But what if we could reprogram the immune system to tolerate these allergens rather than react with inflammation?
A team of researchers led by Jeffrey Hubbell, Vice President of Life Sciences and Engineering at New York University and Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at NYU Tandon, of Biology and Chemistry at NYU Faculty of Arts and Science, and Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at NYU Langone Health along with researchers at the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have developed a new therapy that does just that — by enlisting an unexpected ally: the liver.
A New Approach to an Old Problem
At the heart of asthma is a dysfunctional immune response. In allergic individuals, exposure to common allergens such as dust mites, pollen, or pet dander triggers an overproduction of inflammatory signals, leading to airway constriction and excessive mucus production.
Current immunotherapy treatments attempt to retrain the immune system by repeatedly exposing it to small doses of the allergen over months or even years. However, this approach is slow, has variable success, and carries the risk of triggering severe allergic reactions.
In their new study, published in Science Translational Medicine, Hubbell and his colleagues at the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, including lead author Jorge Emiliano Gómez Medellín, introduced a novel form of allergen immunotherapy called liver-targeted immunotherapy (LIT). Unlike traditional allergy shots or sublingual tablets, LIT exploits the liver’s natural ability to promote immune tolerance.
“The liver has long been known as a unique organ, capable of suppressing immune responses to harmless antigens from food and blood-borne particles,” says Jeffrey Hubbell, a senior author of the study. “We wondered—could we harness this natural tolerance mechanism to turn off allergic reactions?”
Engineering a Smarter Allergy Shot
To achieve this, the researchers chemically modified allergens by synthetically attaching sugar molecules called mannose to their surfaces. This process, known as synthetic mannosylation, allows the allergens to bypass the immune system’s usual alarms and instead be delivered directly to the liver. There, specialized immune cells reprogram the response from one of inflammation to tolerance.
In preclinical trials, mice that received LIT developed a robust population of regulatory T cells—immune cells that act as peacekeepers, instructing the body to ignore allergens rather than attack them. Remarkably, just two doses of the therapy provided year-long protection against allergic asthma symptoms.
“The speed and durability of this treatment are unprecedented,” says Hubbell. “Traditional allergen immunotherapy can take years to work. With LIT, we’re seeing long-lasting immune tolerance after only two interventions.”
One of the biggest risks of current allergy treatments is the potential for severe allergic reactions, including life-threatening anaphylaxis. This happens when the immune system mistakes the introduced allergen as a threat and mounts an aggressive defense.
To test whether LIT could avoid this problem, the researchers administered their engineered allergens to sensitized mice—essentially a model for patients with severe allergies. Unlike unmodified allergens, which triggered dangerous immune responses, the mannosylated allergens did not provoke any allergic symptoms. Instead, they were quietly processed by the liver, leading to a significant reduction in airway inflammation.
“Given this improved safety profile and the effective long-term tolerance without continuous treatment, it is tempting to weigh the benefits of LIT with its novel administration,” says Trevor W.M. Ung, co-lead in the project from UChicago PME.
A Future Beyond Asthma?
While this study focused on allergic asthma, the principles of LIT could be extended to other allergic diseases, including food allergies and atopic dermatitis. “Given the fear caused by food-induced anaphylaxis, LIT has the potential to provide some relief to children and parents throughout by reducing this risk” Gómez Medellín says.
Additionally, since the approach relies on generating immune tolerance, it may hold promise for treating autoimmune diseases, where the immune system mistakenly attacks the body's own tissues.
The next step for the research team is to test LIT in human clinical trials after additional laboratory work targeting house dust mite allergy and food allergens. If the results hold up in people, this therapy could revolutionize the treatment of allergic diseases, offering a rapid, safe, and long-lasting solution to millions of patients worldwide.
For over a century, allergen immunotherapy has remained largely unchanged, relying on repeated exposure to allergens in hopes of gradually reducing sensitivity. LIT challenges this slow and risky process by leveraging the body's built-in tolerance mechanisms to achieve faster and safer results.
“Rather than fighting against the immune system’s natural tendencies, we’re working with them,” Hubbell explains. “This could be the future of allergy treatment—a way to not just manage symptoms, but to cure the disease at its source.”
J. Emiliano Gómez Medellín et al., Liver-targeted allergen immunotherapy rapidly and safely induces antigen-specific tolerance to treat allergic airway disease in mice.Sci. Transl. Med.17, eadl0406(2025). DOI:10.1126/scitranslmed.adl0406
Microbes in Brooklyn Superfund site teach lessons on fighting industrial pollution
Using advanced DNA sequence analysis, a research team led by NYU Tandon School of Engineering's Assistant Professor Elizabeth Hénaff has discovered that tiny organisms in Brooklyn's highly contaminated Gowanus Canal have developed a comprehensive collection of pollution-fighting genes.
The findings – covered by Popular Science, among other outlets – were published in the Journal of Applied Microbiology on April 15, 2025.
The team identified 455 species of microorganisms wielding 64 different biochemical pathways to degrade pollutants and 1,171 genes to process heavy metals. This suggests the potential of a cheaper, more sustainable, and less disruptive method for cleaning contaminated waterways than the current oft-used dredging operations.
The researchers also discovered 2,300 novel genetic sequences that could enable microbes to produce potentially valuable biochemical compounds for medicine, industry, or environmental applications.
"We found what amounts to nature's own toxic cleanup manual, but with a crucial warning," said Hénaff, who sits in NYU Tandon's Technology, Culture and Society Department and is a member of Tandon's Center for Urban Science + Progress. "These microbes have stories to tell that go beyond scientific data."
To communicate these stories effectively, Hénaff and colleagues created CHANNEL, an immersive installation at BioBAT Art Space in Brooklyn, New York featuring sculpture, prints, sound, and projections alongside over 300 gallons of native Gowanus sediment and water that has been growing over the last 9 months. The Living Interfaces Lab, Hénaff's research group, uses methods from sciences and arts to address pressing urban issues.
"While more research is needed to understand how to cooperate with these organisms effectively, the discovery of such genetic tools for pollution cleanup may offer valuable lessons for environmental restoration worldwide," Hénaff said. "I consider artistic research to be a key component in not just illustrating but also informing our scientific research." The work is on view at the exhibit’s closing event on April 18, 2025.
The team discovered genes for resistance to eight different classes of antibiotics in the canal microbes, with some coming from human gut bacteria that enter the canal during Combined Sewer Overflows – when heavy rainfall causes stormwater and untreated sewage to discharge directly into waterways. Other resistance genes were found in native aquatic species.
“The long-term coexistence of microbial communities from sewage and the natural canal environment is expected to enhance the rates of horizontal transfer of a wide array of genetic elements, and as such merits our attention for public health monitoring and surveillance as environmental ‘superbug’ reservoirs,” said Sergios-Orestis Kolokotronis, a study co-author and assistant professor of epidemiology and infectious diseases at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University.
Despite these concerns, the study also reveals promising potential benefits. While the pollutant-degrading microbes in the canal can break down contaminants, their natural processes are too slow for practical cleanup. Understanding their genetic adaptations could help scientists develop faster methods, either by isolating specific microbes for treatment or enhancing their abilities.
Some classes of contaminants such as heavy metals are also valuable materials for industry, and bioremediation methods could be adapted to resource recovery for re-use, not just removal.
To make its discoveries, the team collected samples from 14 locations along the canal's 1.8-mile length, gathering both surface sediment and deep core samples reaching 11.5 feet below the canal floor. They found microbes capable of breaking down many historical pollutants, including petroleum products, PCBs, and industrial solvents.
The findings come as the Environmental Protection Agency continues its $1.5 billion dredging and capping operation at the canal, removing contaminated sediment and sealing remaining pollution under clean material.
The team's current study builds on prior research spanning a decade to understand the Gowanus Canal microbiome. The project began in 2014 when the current study’s co-authors Ian Quate of Fruit Studio and Matthew Seibert of the University of Virginia led the first sediment sampling, processing samples at community bio lab Genspace with study co-author Ellen Jorgensen of Biotech without Borders.
The DNA was sequenced in the lab of study co-author Christopher Mason – WorldQuant Professor of Genomics and Computational Biomedicine at Weill Cornell Medicine – as part of the Pathomap Project, now expanded to cities around the world in the metagenomics of subways and urban biomes (MetaSUB) project.
“The hardy microbial organisms of the Gowanus Canal have a unique genetic catalog of survival, which provides a roadmap for adaptation and directed evolution that we can use in polluted sites around the world,” said Mason, who serves as co-founder and Director of the MetaSUB Consortium.
Later, lead author Hénaff's team collected more samples through the BKBioReactor project while study co-author Kolokotronisgathered core samples. Bioinformatic approaches implemented by study co-authors Chandrima Bhattacharya of Weill Cornell Medicine and Rupobrata Panja of Rutgers University allowed the team to identify microbes breaking down industrial pollutants in the canal's thick sediment.
This research was supported by funding from WorldQuant Foundation, the Pershing Square Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and NYU Tandon.
Sergios-Orestis Kolokotronis, Chandrima Bhattacharya, Rupobrata Panja, Ian Quate, Matthew Seibert, Ellen Jorgensen, Christopher E Mason, Elizabeth M Hénaff, Metagenomic interrogation of urban Superfund site reveals antimicrobial resistance reservoir and bioremediation potential, Journal of Applied Microbiology, Volume 136, Issue 4, April 2025, lxaf076, https://doi.org/10.1093/jambio/lxaf076
3D streaming gets leaner by seeing only what matters
A new approach to streaming technology may significantly improve how users experience virtual reality and augmented reality environments, according to a study from NYU Tandon School of Engineering.
The research — presented in a paper at the 16th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference on April 1, 2025 — describes a method for directly predicting visible content in immersive 3D environments, potentially reducing bandwidth requirements by up to 7-fold while maintaining visual quality.
The technology is being applied in an ongoing NYU Tandon National Science Foundation-funded project to bring point cloud video to dance education, making 3D dance instruction streamable on standard devices with lower bandwidth requirements.
"The fundamental challenge with streaming immersive content has always been the massive amount of data required," explained Yong Liu — professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (ECE) at NYU Tandon and faculty member at both NYU Tandon's Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications (CATT) and NYU WIRELESS — who led the research team. "Traditional video streaming sends everything within a frame. This new approach is more like having your eyes follow you around a room — it only processes what you're actually looking at."
The technology addresses the "Field-of-View (FoV)" challenge for immersive experiences. Current AR/VR applications demand high bandwidth — a point cloud video (which renders 3D scenes as collections of data points in space) consisting of 1 million points per frame requires more than 120 megabits per second, nearly 10 times the bandwidth of standard high-definition video.
Unlike traditional approaches that first predict where a user will look and then calculate what's visible, this new method directly predicts content visibility in the 3D scene. By avoiding this two-step process, the approach reduces error accumulation and improves prediction accuracy.
The system divides 3D space into "cells" and treats each cell as a node in a graph network. It uses transformer-based graph neural networks to capture spatial relationships between neighboring cells, and recurrent neural networks to analyze how visibility patterns evolve over time.
For pre-recorded virtual reality experiences, the system can predict what will be visible for a user 2-5 seconds ahead, a significant improvement over previous systems that could only accurately predict a user’s FoV a fraction of a second ahead.
"What makes this work particularly interesting is the time horizon," said Liu. "Previous systems could only accurately predict what a user would see a fraction of a second ahead. This team has extended that."
The research team's approach reduces prediction errors by up to 50% compared to existing methods for long-term predictions, while maintaining real-time performance of more than 30 frames per second even for point cloud videos with over 1 million points.
For consumers, this could mean more responsive AR/VR experiences with reduced data usage, while developers can create more complex environments without requiring ultra-fast internet connections.
"We're seeing a transition where AR/VR is moving from specialized applications to consumer entertainment and everyday productivity tools," Liu said. "Bandwidth has been a constraint. This research helps address that limitation."
The researchers released their code to support continued development. Their work was supported in part by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) grant 2312839.
In addition to Liu, the paper's authors are Chen Li and Tongyu Zong both NYU Tandon Ph.D candidates in Electrical Engineering; Yueyu Hu, NYU Tandon Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Electronics Engineering; and Yao Wang, NYU Tandon professor who sits in ECE, the Biomedical Engineering Department, CATT and NYU WIRELESS.
C. Li, T. Zong, Y. Hu, Y. Wang, Y. Liu. 2025. Spatial Visibility and Temporal Dynamics: Rethinking Field of View Prediction in Adaptive Point Cloud Video Streaming. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 24–34.