Faculty Research Initiative

This project concerns the use of large foundation AI models for new tasks by modifying them instead of creating new models from scratch. These foundation models take a lot of computing power to train, but they show good, “out-of-the-box” baseline performance in many tasks. The project aims to take these pre-trained models and improve and adjust them for new tasks, a process called “transfer learning." The goal is to create tools that help apply this method to real-world problems, such as analyzing medical and remote-sensing images, by starting with large models trained on different types of data and improving them for specific tasks.

David Sweet, M.S. in Artificial Intelligence, aims to improve a method called Bayesian Optimization, which helps design and enhance systems like AI models, social media platforms and pharmaceuticals by running experiments. These experiments are essential for seeing how well a system works, but they can be expensive and time-consuming. His project will focus on dealing with complex systems that have many variables, or dimensions. More dimensions usually mean more experiments, but his goal is to reduce the number of experiments needed while still finding the best solutions. He and his eam are developing a new algorithm to make this process faster and more efficient, especially for systems with many variables.

Irina Catrina of Yeshiva College and Rana Khan, program director of the M.S. in Biotechnology Management and Entrepreneurship are leading this project will on understanding how RNA, a molecule that plays a key role in cellular functions, moves within cells. The project will use advanced techniques to design special probes that can detect and visualize RNA in cells, helping scientists better understand how it contributes to processes like gene expression—how information from DNA is used—and mRNA translation, the process of making proteins. The researchers will also focus on improving the probes to make them more efficient and cost-effective, which could lead to breakthroughs in diagnosing and treating diseases, such as cancer and genetic disorders.

Amiya Waldman-Levi, OT Doctorate, and Honggang Wang, Graduate Computer Science and Engineering, are developing an innovative AI tool to streamline behavioral assessment processes in clinical practice and research. The AI-powered tool will provide accurate and reliable scoring for video footage, saving clinicians’ time, ensuring accuracy and reliability of assessments, and reducing costs while improving clinical outcomes.

This interdisciplinary project that seeks to compile comprehensive information on rare diseases that is currently difficult to find and access into an interactive, centralized digital platform. The hub will streamline access to information for patients, caregivers and healthcare providers, improving the likelihood of diagnosis and treatment for rare diseases affecting over 300 million people worldwide.

This project will investigate a new approach to treating diseases, such as cancer, inflammatory and immune disorders, by targeting proteins that are traditionally considered “undruggable.” These proteins are difficult to attack with regular drugs because they lack suitable sites for binding or can’t interact with the enzyme Ubiquitin ligase, which helps degrade and remove unwanted proteins in cells. To solve this problem, Viswanathan’s team is using a new technique involving small molecules called molecular glue degraders. These molecules help bring the problematic protein, called the protein of interest, and the enzyme Ubiquitin ligase, called the effector protein, close together. The project aims to find the best molecular glue from a library of small molecules that can form this ternary complex and effectively degrade the target protein.

This project aims to change healthcare delivery by creating a digital platform that increases access to care in underserved areas. In communities with limited access to healthcare, environmental health records make it easier to provide consistent care and track patients’ conditions over time. By incorporating telemedicine, mobile health apps and electronic health records, the system seeks to improve patient outcomes and address healthcare inequities. This project is expected to serve 200 to 300 patients each month.

Radhashree Maitra is exploring viral-based treatments for polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) in her project. PCOS is a leading cause of infertility and other metabolic disorders in women. The innovative approach involves using oncolytic viruses to correct hormonal imbalances and improve ovarian function, offering a more targeted and effective treatment than conventional therapies.

This project will focus on the study of bioluminescence—how certain living organisms produce light. The project aims to discover and study new enzymes, called luciferases, from deep-sea animals called cnidarians. These luciferases are responsible for the light emission when they interact with a chemical called coelenterazine. The team will use advanced techniques, like RNA sequencing and molecular cloning, to understand how these luciferases work, while modifying these luciferases to make them more efficient. This could lead to improvements in various biological studies and practical applications, like drug screening and molecular imaging.

Faculty Leads:

• Dr. Roee Holtzer, Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology and Albert Einstein College of Medicine

The mission of the cluster is to initiate, support and promote interdisciplinary, state-of-the-art, innovative and clinically relevant research dedicated to understanding and improving mental and physical health in the elderly and those with chronic disease. The long-term goal is to establish a nationally recognized center of excellence for research in health at .

Faculty Leads:

• Dr. Elisabeth Mlawski, Katz School M.S. in Speech-Language Pathology
• Dr. Laura Sylvia, Katz School M.S. in Speech-Language Pathology

The purpose of this project is to create recorded simulations that could be used across all the health science programs on how to administer hearing screenings, such as tympanogram, pure tone testing, the whispered voice test and Weber hearing test. Students and faculty in the M.S. in Speech-Language Pathology program will develop training videos and simulations that will be placed in a Canvas learning site to be shared with all of the Katz School health hub, as well as .

Faculty Leads:

• Dr. Youshan Zhang, Katz School M.S. in Artificial Intelligence

This proposal will develop a machine-learning chat robot that can assist in a student’s academic endeavors in machine learning courses, utilizing a newly developed Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) model. The chat robot aims to provide better personalized and interactive learning experiences for students with machine learning algorithms, natural language processing and a vast assortment of educational resources. It can offer enhanced conversational abilities, personalized learning experiences, comprehensive subject coverage, real-time assistance and continual learning and improvement.

Faculty lead:

• Dr. Marian Gidea, Director of Graduate Mathematics and Associate Dean for STEM Research, Katz School

This project will create an interdisciplinary research cluster, including faculty and students from the Katz School, Yeshiva College, Stern College for Women and Sy Syms School of Business, for developing practical tools and methods to understand, model and forecast critical phenomena in complex systems, such as crashes of financial markets, extreme weather events and regime shifts in physical and biological systems. A primary objective is to create a financial crises observatory, which will monitor financial markets in real time. The observatory will develop a scientific and computational platform to detect early warning signals for critical transitions—abrupt shifts in the state of a system triggered by small disturbances.

Faculty Leads:

• Dr. Amiya Waldman-Levi, Katz School Occupational Therapy Doctorate
• Dr. Lola Halperin, Sacred Heart University
• Dr. Danette Brown, SACFS Head Start

A clear gap exists in the literature exploring strength-based interventions that provide tools to help parents promote healthy play opportunities to foster children’s playfulness and psychological adjustment. This project will assess the feasibility of the researchers’ Promoting Health Through Play Opportunities telehealth program delivered in English and Spanish to parents of children ages 3 to 5.

Faculty Lead:

• Dr. Anderson Oliveira, Stern College

The primary objective of this proposal is the isolation of glowing proteins from luminescent marine organisms. These proteins, once purified, serve as tags to target specific proteins of interest in other cells and organisms in the lab. This approach holds potential in various applications, including the study of disease-associated proteins like those implicated in cancer. Additionally, Dr. Oliveira and students in the M.S. in Biotechnology Management and Entrepreneurship will explore the use of these proteins to illuminate tissues and cells, enhancing imaging capabilities for diagnostic purposes.

Faculty Lead:

• Dr. Gabriel Cwilich, Katz School M.A. and Ph.D. in Physics

The collapse of one financial institution can result in the failure of many others since banks possess assets in other banks, and the effects of the loss of value of one of them has consequences for the others. Dr. Cwilich and his team are trying to model this effect of cascading failures through the tools of network theory, which have been used successfully to model other cascading phenomena in electric energy distribution, communication networks and epidemics. For the first time, they are incorporating the real cross-holdings of the different banks in the design of the model of the network, as well as the further depreciation of assets that ensues after the public loses confidence in the solvency of the failing banks.

Faculty Leads:

• Dr. lrina Catrina, Yeshiva College
• Dr. Rana Khan, Katz School M.S. in Biotechnology Management and Entrepreneurship

The research team will develop computational tools to design probes predicted to inhibit HIV-1 viral replication. This contribution will be significant, as it will allow the use of fast and inexpensive tools to design safer and more effective drugs that will ultimately lead to more efficient antiviral therapeutic approaches.

Faculty Leads:

• Dr. Amiya Waldman-Levi, Katz School Occupational Therapy Doctorate
• Dr. Anita Bundy, Colorado State University

This study will explore how college students in health-based professions who exhibit higher levels of playfulness and engage in leisure activities are more likely to utilize adaptive coping mechanisms and achieve better academic performance compared to those who have lower levels of playfulness and engage less in leisure activities.

Faculty Leads:

• Dr. Sai Praveen Kadiyala, Katz School M.S. in Artificial Intelligence
• Dr. Rana Khan, Katz School M.S. in Biotechnology Management and Entrepreneurship
• Dr. Ramana Vinjamuri, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

The researchers will use novel signal decomposition methodologies, such as Empirical Fourier Decomposition, to obtain significant components of signals and develop a mapping strategy of the significant components of each gesture to its weight in a classification model. This will help in building novel light-weight classification models and an emphasis on gestures that can be effective in the rehabilitation process. We also aim to develop our own sEMG database, compare it with the available public databases and verify the accuracy of models on these databases, along with dimensionally reduced versions of the same.

Faculty Leads:

• Dr. Margarita Vigodner, Stern College for Women
• Dr. Rana Khan, Katz School M.S. Biotechnology Management and Entrepreneurship

This project focuses on the mis-regulation of the cell cycle in testicular cells and studies how it can lead to infertility or testicular cancer. The goal is to obtain new information about cell cycle regulation in normal and cancerous cells, particularly through studying a recently identified protein that may play an important role. Katz School graduate students will be involved in all aspects of the proposed research, and they will be trained in a variety of advanced cell and molecular biology techniques. In the past, Katz graduate students involved in projects such as these have published as co-authors on peer-reviewed publications.

Faculty Leads:

• Sai Praveen Kadiyala, postdoctoral research fellow, M.S. in Artificial Intelligence
• Rana Khan, director and clinical associate professor, M.S. in Biotechnology Management and Entrepreneurship

Tele-rehabilitation is gaining prominence, particularly for its financial viability and at-home practice. This project will explore the effectiveness of tele-rehabilitation in treating upper-limb stroke patients. Dr. Sai Praveen Kadiyala and Dr. Rana Khan aim to build an exoskeleton specifically designed for upper-limb stroke patients using a network of connected smart devices referred to as IoT, or internet of things.

The project will take a two-pronged approach. After conducting an extensive survey of published works that focus on building exoskeletons for upper-limb stroke rehabilitation, Drs. Kadiyala and Khan will incorporate IoT aspects into existing exoskeletons. They will then design architectures containing new features, build the proof-of-concept exoskeleton models and compare the effectiveness of their proposed novelties.

Faculty Leads:

• Pablo Roldan, assistant professor of mathematics, , and director, M.S. in Artificial Intelligence
• Brandon Chiazza, industry faculty, M.S. in Data Analytics and Visualization

This collaborative project between Katz faculty and Audi seeks to improve and expand the research on automated driving. Audi Automated Driving Development (A2D2) gathers data by using a prototype car. Due to the large amount of data that is gathered and labeled manually, this is a costly process.

Through the use of data analysis and artificial intelligence, Dr. Roldan and Professor Chiazza’s areas of study, they hope to accelerate the costly process for detecting and labeling data, as well as improve the quality of the data. Additionally, they aim to integrate their solution with the existing pipeline and automate as much as possible.

Faculty Leads:

• Margarita Vigodner, professor of biology, Stern College for Women
• Rana Khan, director and clinical associate professor, M.S. in Biotechnology Management and Entrepreneurship

This project will focus on the misregulation of the cell cycle in testicular cells and study how it can lead to infertility or testicular cancer. The goal is to obtain new information about cell cycle regulation in normal and cancerous cells, particularly through studying a recently identified protein that may play an important role.

Katz School graduate students will be involved in all aspects of the proposed research, and they will be trained in a variety of advanced cell and molecular biology techniques. In the past, Katz graduate students involved in projects such as these have published as co-authors on peer-reviewed publications.

Faculty Leads:

• Philip Kalikman, principal investigator and assistant professor of finance and real estate, Sy Syms School of Business
• Andy Catlin, director and clinical assistant professor, M.S. in Data Analytics and Visualization
• Brandon Chiazza, industry professor, M.S. in Data Analytics and Visualization

Artificial intelligence and machine learning models have increasingly been used to determine eligibility and interest rates for consumer debt. However, existing research on the adoption of these technologies is limited due to lack of model transparency.

This project aims to implement a modern neural network model of consumer credit performance and compare the model against an existing structural model. These findings will have broad implications for how fintech and mainstream lenders build and deploy artificial intelligence and machine learning models, and for the trillion-dollar consumer credit industry more broadly.

Faculty Lead:

• Lorraine Marchand, industry professor, M.S. in Biotechnology Management and Entrepreneurship

The number of women entrepreneurs in STEM lags far behind the number of men. Only 20% of Fortune 500 chief innovation officers are women, women founders represent 2-3% of venture capital investments, women make up 2-3% of venture capital partners, and there is a 16% gender wage gap among STEM professionals. Half as many women as men are likely to start their own business, and 95% of women who do start their own business fail within a year because they can’t secure funding and other necessary support. 

In this project, Lorraine Marchand will work with women entrepreneurs in the early stages of their technology startups. She will implement and evaluate the effectiveness of the approach described in her book, The Innovation Mindset: Eight Essential Steps for Transforming Any Industry, as well as her Resource Guide for Women Innovators, to increase the chances of commercial success for women innovators in STEM. The work is intended to raise the profile and number of women entrepreneurs in STEM and to demonstrate that women innovators can raise funds and experience commercial success by following a structured process and with appropriate coaching and support.

Faculty Leads:

• Amiya Waldman-Levi, director of scholarship and research and clinical associate professor, Occupational Therapy Doctorate
• Jeanine Stancanelli, associate director and associate professor of occupational therapy, 
• Alexandra Wagner, doctoral capstone coordinator and clinical assistant professor, Occupational Therapy Doctorate

There is evidence that social-emotional factors contribute to older adults’ engagement and satisfaction in life despite a decline in physical and mental health as they age. This collaborative project between the Occupational Therapy program at Mercy College and the Katz School’s Occupational Therapy Doctorate program will test the effectiveness of health, aging and wellness (HAW) group programs.

The research team will conduct a pilot study comparing in-person and remote delivery of the HAW programs for older adults living independently in a community. The program combines yoga, hope theory and mindfulness to support physical, mental and emotional aging in place. This work builds on a preliminary study in which the researchers found that the newly developed HAW program had a positive impact on older adults’ sense of hope.

Faculty Lead:

• Dr. Ran Drori, assistant professor of chemistry, Stern College, and M.A./Ph.D. in Physics, Katz School

The focus of this project is to measure and understand the kinetics of ice recrystallization, ice nucleation, and growth in frozen food products using micro-thermography (infrared-based imaging). Understanding the mechanism of ice recrystallization imaging and the kinetics of ice growth and nucleation in frozen food will lead to the development of new manufacturing standards of food freezing rates, storage temperatures and the addition of ice recrystallization inhibitors.

The ultimate goal is to develop ways to improve the quality of frozen food products, limit food waste and loss caused by ice recrystallization, and improve quality by extending the storage time of frozen foods.