Facilities & resources

New York University (NYU) was established in 1831 and is one of America’s leading research universities. It provides students with an environment of scholars and resources that enrich the educational experience and support faculty in the development of innovative programs. It is one of the largest private universities, and has among the greatest number of international students, and sends more students to study abroad than any other college or university in the U.S. Through its 18 schools and colleges, NYU conducts research and provides education in the arts and sciences, law, medicine, business, dentistry, education, nursing, the cinematic and dramatic arts, music, public administration, social work, and continuing and professional studies, among other areas. NYU occupies five major centers in Manhattan and has sites in over 20 study-abroad countries around the world. The University’s motto is a “Private University in Public Service”.

The School of Medicine has a proud history dating back to its founding in 1841. Over our history, NYU scientists have produced groundbreaking discoveries, some of which have led to Nobel Prizes, and all of which have helped advance the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Our researchers have been at the forefront of devising creative and effective solutions to some of the world's most complex healthcare issues. In the last three decades our researchers have registered more than 1,450 inventions and been issued more than 760 patents, more than half of which have been licensed. We have ranked first among U.S. universities in income from technology licensing over the past five years. Our extraordinary record puts us in a leadership position in what has become an increasingly important role for academic medical centers: the transformation of laboratory research into new diagnostics, medicines, and devices. In 2014, NYULMC received $156.8 million in NIH awards and was ranked 14th among schools of medicine in NIH funding.  This 42% increase in NIH award funding since 2008 was achieved during a period in which the total NIH budget was stagnant, providing further evidence of the strength of our investigators and research initiatives. New York University School of Medicine comprises the Medical School, the Sackler Institute of Graduate Biomedical Sciences, and the Skirball Institute for Biomolecular Medicine. The School’s current grant portfolio is over $400M inclusive of all sponsored support.

NYU Langone Medical Center is one of the nation's premier centers of excellence in healthcare, biomedical research, and medical education. Located in Manhattan, NYU Langone is composed of four hospitals —Tisch Hospital, its flagship acute care facility, a 730-bed acute-care tertiary facility; Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine, the first rehabilitation hospital in the world, with extensive inpatient and outpatient rehabilitation programs; the 190-bed Hospital for Joint Diseases, one of only five hospitals in the world dedicated to orthopedics and rheumatology; and Hassenfeld Pediatric Center, a comprehensive pediatric hospital supporting a full array of children's health services across the medical center —plus the NYU School of Medicine, one of the nation's preeminent academic institutions and one of 18 schools and colleges of New York University. In addition, NYU Langone Medical Center offers ambulatory-care services in various Manhattan neighborhoods, the outer boroughs, Long Island, New Jersey and Westchester County, bringing services directly to where our patients live and work. NYU Langone's medical students, residents, and faculty also provide patient care at Bellevue Hospital Center, the nation's oldest public hospital, and the Medical Center is affiliated with Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn, Gouverneur Healthcare Services in Manhattan, and the New York Harbor Veterans Affairs Medical Center. The Medical Center's trifold mission to serve, teach, and discover is achieved on a daily basis through the seamless integration of an academic culture devoted to excellence in patient care, education and research.

NYU Langone Medical Center (consisting of New York University School of Medicine and NYU Hospitals Center) and the broader New York University community offer a physical, organizational and intellectual infrastructure that creates a unique and rich environment to foster and support research, education, and clinical care. NYU Langone has over 50 centers, more than 20 core facilities and shared technology resources, 29 academic departments in the clinical and basic sciences, and 550,000 square feet of research space as of 2013. During the 2014-2015 academic year, the School of Medicine faculty consisted of 1,360 full-time and 2,175 part-time members, including nearly 100 endowed professors. The student and trainee population consisted of 736 MD candidates, 68 MD/PhD candidates, 296 PhD candidates, 975 residents and fellows, 381 postdoctoral fellows, and nearly 4,788 registrants in postgraduate continuing medical education courses.
Department of Population Health (Chair: Marc N. Gourevitch, MD, MPH)

The Department of Population Health serves as the academic home to several broad groups of scientists: investigators specifically focused on strategies and interventions to improve population health, investigators in epidemiology, biostatistics and related fields of methodologic research, and medical ethics. {Remove sentence if not applicable: The Department of Population Health will administer and oversee the current proposal}. The Department was initiated in January 2012, with Marc N. Gourevitch, MD, MPH appointed as its inaugural Chair. A core focus of the Department lies in improving health outcomes through innovative interventions as well as in enhancing the impact of interventions already known to be effective through their more effective implementation and dissemination. Collaboration with key public sector stakeholders and with community partners is central to the Department’s mission. As researchers, faculty are engaged in dual roles: building cutting-edge science in their areas of inquiry, and providing collaborative consultation to other investigators throughout the NYULMC academic community as well as across the University. Resources within the Department for this proposal include the use of over 5,000 square feet of dedicated office space located in the newly renovated NYULMC Translational Research Building, telecom (phone, fax and LAN connections), administrative assistants, and grant, regulatory (IRB) and finance administrators. {enter PI’s name} will oversee all grant-related matters with the help of {enter Co-Investigator’s name}, Department of Population Health administrators, and in coordination with the NYUSOM Sponsored Programs Administration office.

The Division of Health and Behavior, develops, tests, and spreads innovative evidence-based behavioral interventions into everyday clinical practice and community settings. The Division focuses on integrating basic behavioral concepts into clinical research across a broad spectrum of health care delivery settings serving New York City’s diverse patient populations. The division’s research agenda targets key gaps in translational science, from bedside to-clinic and clinic-to-population. A life course perspective informs the development of behavioral interventions that target all ages and sectors of the population served by NYU Langone Medical Center and its affiliates. The division promotes education and training in translational behavioral medicine research leading to the development of a new cadre of investigators with expertise in this field.

The Center for Healthful Behavior Change develops, implements, and disseminates innovative evidence-based behavioral interventions in routine clinical practice and community-based settings. The Center is dedicated to developing a new cadre of investigators with expertise in translational behavioral medicine and serve as a resource for research in the development of conceptual, theoretical, an applied models of health behavior change through inter- and multidisciplinary collaboration.

The Section will advance global health research initiatives in the Department in addition to supporting the School of Medicine’s medical student and clinical training initiatives. A particular focus of the Section will be on building research capacity with a particular (though not exclusive) focus on non-communicable diseases in Low and Middle Income Countries, including dissemination and implementation science, health services and comparative effectiveness research.

The vision of the Section for Health Equity is to promote health equity in racial and ethnic minority populations and socially disadvantaged communities through community engagement, research, training, and policy. The Section is guided by a multi-tiered framework that applies a community-based participatory research approach to its programs, includes multiple sectors as stakeholders, and applies an asset-based approach to health promotion and disease prevention. The Section is anchored by four unique centers and programs that include: the NYU Center for the Study of Asian American Health (CSAAH), the currently funded NYU-CUNY Prevention Research Center (PRC) at NYU, and the NYU REACH Center of Excellence in the Elimination of Hepatitis B Disparities (B Free CEED).

The Section on Health Choice, Policy and Evaluation aims to define and optimize the influence of public policy on health and health choices. Using behavioral economics and other approaches, the faculty focuses on disadvantaged populations and pressing public health problems such as obesity.

The Center for Early Childhood Health and Development (CEHD) works to promote health and development among ethnically diverse children living in low-income communities. The Center is home to ParentCorps, an evidence-based family-focused intervention that aims to promote high-quality home and classroom experiences for young children. Faculty are experts in prevention science, intervention development, behavior change and implementation science.

The Division of Comparative Effectiveness and Decision Science is located within the Department of Population Health in the NYU School of Medicine. Its mission is to work closely with stakeholders and funders to conduct policy-relevant, useful, and scientifically meritorious research regarding quality and value in healthcare, including comparative effectiveness research. This research emphasizes areas with particularly great population impact on morbidity and mortality (e.g., HIV). The division includes novel structural features to increase its policy-relevance, including working closely with policymakers and thought-leaders in major stakeholder groups (payers, providers, and patients) to frame research questions in policy-relevant contexts, and to disseminate the results of this research for rapid implementation.

The Section for Value and Effectiveness works to improve healthcare by performing research that improves Personalization, Prioritization, and Resource Allocation. SOLVE is committed to improving healthcare by performing scientifically rigorous research that informs clinical care and health policy.

The Section on Tobacco, Alcohol and Drug Use focuses on developing innovative approaches to preventing and treating substance use and abuse. This includes transforming primary care to integrate screening and treatment of addiction as a routine part of primary care and criminal justice settings, as well as developing population-level strategies to address substance use problems. Specific programs include the Manhattan Tobacco Cessation Program (MTCP), funded by the New York State Department of Health. MTCP’s mission is to develop and test strategies for dissemination of the Public Health Service guideline for treating tobacco use and dependence throughout a wide range of health care settings. Federally funded projects include initiatives to improve smoking cessation rates among veterans and hospitalized persons, to screen for substance use in primary care, and to integrate pharmacotherapy for opioid and alcohol dependence into primary care and criminal justice settings.

The Division of Biostatistics is the academic home of faculty who contribute to scientific advances that benefit human health through innovation in methodology, theory, and application of biostatistical methods across the entire spectrum of biomedical research. The Division of Biostatistics at NYU School of Medicine is engaged in teaching, statistical and collaborative research, and consultation with the researchers in the School of Medicine. The members of the Biostatistics group provide statistical expertise in research study design, conduct, analysis, interpretation, and reporting of results for laboratory studies, clinical trials, and observational studies. The members of the Biostatistics group have played integral roles in cancer research at NYU through the NYU Cancer Institute Biostatistics Shared Resource, in environmental health research through the NIEHS Center for Environmental Health Statistics and Bioinformatics Facility Core, and in clinical and translational research through NYU CTSI Study Design, Biostatistics and Clinical Research Ethics Core. Through these Core groups, collaboration is provided to basic science, clinical, cancer epidemiology, prevention and translational research programs, and to the core research services. Faculty members in the Division of Biostatistics are actively engaged in research. The resources of these Core groups are available to members and include collaboration in the development of new research initiatives for grant funding, collaboration in funded peer-reviewed cancer research projects, and short-term collaborations in research projects. The areas of research include: survival analysis; clinical trials; methods for the analysis of screening and diagnostic tests; misclassification; methods for the analysis of observational data; statistical methods in epidemiology; statistical genomics; statistical genetics; likelihood and information theory; mixture models; order statistics and spacings; resampling techniques; high-dimensional data analysis; algorithms for missing data analysis; cluster analysis; statistical methods for analysis of large datasets in genomics and molecular biology; DNA microarrays and; flow cytometry.

The focus of the Division of Epidemiology, in the Department of Population Health, is to gain new understanding of the inter-relationship of genetic and environmental factors impacting human health and providing the scientific basis for translation of this knowledge to public health action. Faculty members in the Division of Epidemiology are actively engaged in research. Investigations of air pollution, related modifying factors, and human health are being carried in U.S. nation-wide studies. Circulating vitamin D and folic acid levels, and associated genetics, are being investigated in relation to breast cancer risk. Serum taurine, a nutrient and popular ingredient in energy drinks, is being evaluated for risk of coronary heart disease and stroke. Several investigations are underway to better understand the role of the human microbiome and related conditions in risk for cancer and cancer precursors. Studies are also underway to identify predictive biomarkers in prostate cancer. Faculty members carry out research in the New York University Women’s Health Study, in other U.S. cohorts and in research consortia, including the NCI Cancer Cohort Consortium, supported by Division of Epidemiology laboratories in genetics and in the human microbiome and genetics.

The Division of Medial Ethics conducts interdisciplinary research on key areas of bioethics including research ethics, rationing and allocation of health resources, the provision of mental health services, and vaccination policies.

The Division has four key areas of activity:

1. 
   to enhance and integrate bioethics in the curriculum of the NYU medical school, professional schools, undergraduate programs and graduate education;
   
2. 
   to generate novel and useful research in core areas including mental health, vaccines, research ethics, rationing, end of life care and sports and society;
   
3. 
   to provide policy advice and guidance to NGOs, professional societies, industry, government, foundations, patient organizations, and other groups and institutions interested in bioethical issues and;
   
4. 
   to foster careers in bioethics
   

The Division of Healthcare Delivery Science, launched in late 2014, bridges NYU Langone’s delivery system with its academic expertise to advance innovation in health care delivery, improve quality of care, reduce costs, and enhance health outcomes.

The theme of the Department’s research is to understand the environmental causes of disease by investigating which genes, epigenetic programs, and cell signaling pathways influence the processes of disease development. The Department of Environmental Medicine focuses on several important research areas, including early detection and prevention, health effects of metals and particulate matter, and susceptibility to environmental disease.