Engineering Collisions: How NYU Is Remaking Health Research

The traditional approach to academic research often involves assembling experts from a single discipline and hoping something useful emerges. However, New York University is turning that model on its head with its new Institute for Engineering Health. The institute's organizing principle centers around disease states rather than traditional disciplines.

Instead of asking what electrical engineers can contribute to medicine, researchers are asking what it would take to cure specific diseases, such as allergic asthma, and then assembling a team with the necessary expertise, whether they are immunologists, computational biologists, materials scientists, AI researchers, or wireless communications engineers. Jeffrey Hubbell, NYU's vice president for bioengineering strategy and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering, leads the institute. The early results are promising, with a chemical engineer and an electrical engineer collaborating to build a device that detects airborne threats, now a startup, and a visually impaired physician teaming up with mechanical engineers to create navigation technology for blind subway riders.

The underlying problem that these collaborations address is conceptual as much as organizational. Hubbell argues that modern medicine has optimized around a single strategy: developing drugs that block specific molecules or suppress targeted immune responses. However, Hubbell asks a different question: rather than inhibiting one bad thing at a time, what if you could promote one good thing and generate a cascade that contravenes several bad pathways simultaneously?

This shift from inhibition to activation requires a fundamentally different toolkit and a different kind of researcher. "We're using biological molecules like proteins, or material-based structures — soluble polymers, supramolecular structures of nanomaterials — to drive these more fundamental features," Hubbell explains. To develop these approaches, researchers need an understanding and mastery of multiple disciplines.

The question then becomes: how do you create researchers with that kind of cross-disciplinary depth? Hubbell's answer is that engineers need to become biologists, immunologists, or neuroscientists. His own students exemplify this, publishing in immunology journals and presenting at immunology conferences.

"Nobody knows they're engineers," he says. NYU is making this milieu physical with a new science and technology hub designed to facilitate encounters between people across various schools and disciplines. The university has acquired a large building in Manhattan that will serve as its science and technology hub, bringing together people doing AI, data science, computational science theory, immunoengineering, biological engineering, materials science, and quantum engineering.