Third Quarter in Review

New York Tech’s original and innovative research enterprise comprises expert faculty and staff who seek to provide a student experience that inspires critically creative thinking through fundamental or applied experiences. This is achieved in large part through faculty and staff research and initiatives that are supported by grants and awards from external funding agencies and partnerships. Following are highlights of grants received from July 1 through September 30, 2021:

• Babak D. Beheshti, Ph.D., College of Engineering and Computing Sciences, and his team received a Xilinx WIT University 2021 Grant award of $25,000, plus 20-25 semiconductor boards in-kind, to support the creation of a summer academy to recruit and engage middle and high school female students in computer science, engineering, and technology disciplines.
• Batu Chalise, Ph.D., College of Engineering and Computing Sciences, received a Naval Research Laboratory award of $100,180 over a two-year period to fund his research titled “Distributed Detection, Estimation, and Resource Allocations in Cognitive Radar Systems with Deep Learning and SDR.”
• Michael Nizich, Ph.D., and the College of Engineering and Computing Sciences’ faculty team of Huanying Gu, Ph.D., Kiran Balagani, Ph.D., and Xueqing Huang have been awarded $71,262 for continued funding of the Department of Defense Cyber Scholarship. In 2020, two College of Engineering and Computing Sciences students were awarded the scholarships given by the DoD as a grant to designated Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Education schools like New York Tech.
• Randy Stout, Ph.D., College of Osteopathic Medicine, has been awarded an American Thyroid Association research grant of $50,000 for his project “Single-Cell Optical Detection of T3 Availability.” The research will use bioengineering and microscopy to identify new therapies for brain and heart dysfunctions that occur in hypothyroidism.
• Jessica Varghese, Ph.D., School of Health Professions, received a $10,000 grant from the American Nurses Association to provide education and training focused on infection prevention and control in order to protect the nation from infectious disease threats, such as COVID-19.

Major grants previously announced during the third quarter of 2021 include National Science Foundation funding awarded to Eve Armstrong, Ph.D., whose EAGER grant is seeking to solve how the universe formed from stardust; Jerry Cheng, Ph.D., for his research to advance mobile edge computing; and Pejman Sanaei, Ph.D., for his research using math to improve and optimize membrane filter performance.  

In addition, Assistant Professor and Department of Education Chair Robert Feirsen, Ed.D., and Professor Stan Silverman, M.S., are leading efforts to work with school districts across Nassau County on K-8 STEM education teacher training initiatives and were granted more than $3.75 million in funding by New York State Department of Education’s Smart Start Grant Program.