NYUAD Institute

09/12/2017 Comedian, writer, actress, tap dancer, and disability advocate Maysoon Zayid tells a humorous tale of beating the odds and laughing in the face of failure. As a Palestinian, Muslim, disabled woman growing up in America, she was taught to dream big and to have no fear. In her talk, she gives advice on how to be the best you that you can be and how we can fix our broken world. Maysoon had...

10/23/2017 In everyday life individuals learn by ‘seeing’ things using light; the same is true in science. The extraordinary power of synchrotron light has made it an essential tool for studying matter on scales ranging from biological cells to atoms. This lecture discusses the idea of SESAME, an international institute in the Middle East built on the successful model of CERN, in fields like archa...

10/3/2017 This lecture underlines the special character of nuclear weapons and discusses the desirability and the feasibility of a nuclear-weapon-free world. In addition to addressing some past activities that worked to promote nuclear disarmament and the transition to a nuclear-weapon-free world, the lecture also covers the significant developments initiated by the January 2007 Wall Street Journa...

11/6/2017 Racial violence, perpetrated by law enforcement or private citizens, has re-emerged as a potent social and political issue in the United States. Yet, racially motivated violence is deeply rooted in American history. Although images of Southern racial violence capture the public imagination, much is still unknown. There is no scholarly consensus on the total number of deaths. Nor do peopl...

10/16/2017 Anthropologist, geneticist, author, and entrepreneur Spencer Wells discusses his work using genetics to track human movement patterns around the world. A new and rapidly-growing industry, consumer genomics gives people the opportunity to learn not only about the origin of their ancestors, but also about the traits they have inherited from them, using DNA data. Through a whirlwind tour o...

10/18/2017 Ubiquity of electronic devices—mostly smart ones with electronic chips embedded in them—is attributed to the desire to improve the quality of our lives, but can we really trust these chips? Driven by cost-conscious consumer electronics, outsourcing of various crucial steps in chip design and fabrication is forcing chip designers and users to re-assess their trust in hardware. Chips are...

11/5/2017 Tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of death, on trajectory to cause 1 billion deaths this century. A particularly alarming trend is the rise of alternative tobacco products, which are often perceived as safe as or less harmful than cigarettes. Dokha tobacco use is very common throughout the Gulf region, and use appears to be emerging in other parts of the world. While the risks...

2017.09.12 Comedian, writer, actress, tap dancer, and disability advocate Maysoon Zayid tells a humorous tale of beating the odds and laughing in the face of failure. As a Palestinian, Muslim, disabled woman growing up in America, she was taught to dream big and to have no fear. In her talk, she gives advice on how to be the best you that you can be and how we can fix our broken world. Maysoon had...

October 1, 2017 Presented by Jane Goodall's Roots & Shoots program, Robert Swan, OBE, one of the world’s greatest explorers, is the first person in history to walk to both the North and South Poles. With his presence and integrity, and his accomplishments and reflections, Swan has an extraordinary ability to inspire and motivate audiences worldwide. Having experienced leadership and team cooperati...

September 26, 2017 Legal practitioners often describe the United Arab Emirates as a "civil law" jurisdiction. But is that description accurate? The United Arab Emirates is called a melting pot because of the many nationalities and cultures that coexist within its borders. Fittingly, the legal system of the United Arab Emirates mirrors the cultural complexity of the country's population. The United...

September 13, 2017 This lecture suggests a new explanation for why international peace interventions so often fail to reach their full potential. Based on several years of research in conflict zones around the world, everyday elements – such as the expatriates’ social habits and common approaches to understanding their areas of operation – strongly influence peacebuilding effectiveness. Through an...

October 8, 2017 In 2007 an agreement was reached between the leadership of New York University and the government of Abu Dhabi to create a cutting edge university that would combine the strengths of Abu Dhabi and NYU. This challenge provided the opportunity to revisit and reevaluate the meaning of a liberal arts institution of higher education in the 21st century, with a truly global character and...

September 17, 2017 In this public lecture, Abouheif will address a number of controversial questions and explore if an understanding or appreciation of evolution is necessary for the advancement of science in the Islamic world. Part of "Evolution Across Disciplines" Speakers Ehab Abouheif James McGill Professor, McGill University; Guggenheim Fellow; Member of the Royal Society of Canada

September 19, 2017 Award winning author and journalist, Charles Siebert, talks of his many experiences visiting with, and writing about, non-human animals, and what they reveal to us about themselves and us. Through his interludes with everyone from a former cellist in an all chimpanzee circus orchestra; to an octopus escape artist; to elephant and whale ventriloquists; to traumatized orphaned par...

2017.09.11 The global circulation of Donald Trump’s political rhetoric during the presidential campaign of 2015-16 produced international dismay, bewilderment, and apprehension, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It also effected a rupture of the crucial divide between American popular culture and US politics—a distinction that allowed American cultural products, massively po...

September 5, 2017 Internationally acclaimed novelist Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Harcourt, 2007) and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (Riverhead Books, 2013), speaks about his newest work Exit West (Riverhead Books, 2017). Set in a world much like modern society, with some surreal twists, this timely and highly acclaimed novel explores the experience of two ordinary...

April 20, 2017 ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) is a degenerative neuromuscular disease; people with late-stage ALS typically retain cognitive function, but lose the motor ability to speak, relying on gaze-controlled AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) devices for interpersonal interactions. State-of-the-art AAC technologies used by people with ALS do not facilitate natural communi...

April 25, 2017 Starting from ‘The Tower. A Concrete Utopia’ (2015), a video-installation made by Congolese photographer Sammy Baloji and Belgian anthropologist Filip De Boeck, this talk proposes a reflection on the legacy of modernist architecture in Kinshasa, the social afterlives of colonialist infrastructure, and different historical and contemporary utopian visions of the city, including those...

May 1, 2017 The premodern Muslim thinkers who undertook the task of surveying the entirety of the human experience attempted to account for not only the world of nature, but also the unseen worlds beyond the senses. This presentation examines the roles assigned to the occult sciences in two encyclopedic works composed in the 14th century: the Muqaddima, the famed Arabic introduction to history by...

May 3, 2017 Diabetes. Obesity. Cancer. Chronic diseases are taking their toll on the world’s population, and their threat is rising. The instinct to accelerate research with a laser focus on finding treatments to halt these diseases in their tracks is shared by researchers, physicians, patients and the general public; but the race to the cure is not always the path to transformative discoveries. B...

April 27, 2017 How can Palestinians most effectively represent their past and present to Western and Arab audiences? This event brings the scholar Rashid Khalidi into conversation with playwright Ismail Khalidi to discuss their academic and artistic trajectories and the ways in which art and scholarship approach Palestinian history and society in differing, complementary ways. Ismail Khalidi Playw...

2017.04.12 What are the most luminous explosions in space? What objects possess the strongest magnetic fields in nature? How can we hear the sirens of the Cosmos? In the last 30 years, High Energy and Gravitational Astrophysics have unveiled exciting new phenomena that address all these questions. Gamma-ray bursts are the brightest flashes in the gamma-ray sky, releasing in a few seconds as much e...

2017.04.09 In recent years, worldwide attention to the protection of animals has risen dramatically. Unlike the global movement for human rights, the animal rights movement has remained confined within particular countries, or regional groupings, operating without the guidance of an international framework or generally agreed upon principles. In this decentralized system of animal rights protectio...

2017.04.03 This lecture is the keynote address for ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS) 2017 People talk about what computing can do for sustainability, but a more concrete and urgent question is: How can computing itself become more sustainable? As more products go online—from medical devices to cars—pre-market testing no longer guarantees a product’s utility or s...

2017.03.09 In a series of personal letters to his son, Omar Saif Ghobash offers a short and highly readable manifesto that tackles our current global crisis with the training of an experienced diplomat and the personal responsibility of a father. Today’s young Muslims will be tomorrow’s leaders, and yet too many are vulnerable to extremist propaganda that seems omnipresent in our technological age...