NYUAD Institute

The NYUAD Institute podcast is NYU Abu Dhabi's archive of public events, recorded where they took place. Some recordings come from the university in Abu Dhabi. Others come from 19 Washington Square North, which introducers describe as NYU Abu Dhabi's home in New York. The format is the event itself. The recordings open with a brief institutional welcome. Then someone sets up the evening, and the audio runs through the talk or panel to the audience questions and a closing sign-off. Sometimes the housekeeping is part of the recording. Maurice Pomerantz, the Institute's executive director and a professor of Arabic literature, begins one evening by announcing a celebration of African theaters run in partnership with the Arts Center. What a listener gets is specialist material delivered to a live audience. The science can get technical. In 'Life’s 24 Hour Clock', Michael Young walks through the molecular loop behind daily rhythms. The Clock and Cycle transcription factors switch on the PER and Timeless genes, and a kinase called double time marks the Period protein for rapid breakdown. At the close he credits collaborators, including work on how flies behave under time-restricted feeding. 'Stem Cells: From Basic Science to Clinical Advances' is a panel instead. Its host, Kirsten Sadler-Edupli, a cell biologist and geneticist on the NYU Abu Dhabi biology faculty, asks her guests Laurence and Sarah how basic embryology prepares the way for work in a dish. Social science sits alongside the lab work. The speaker in 'The Power of Us: How Shared Identities Shape Conflict and Cooperation' uses early-pandemic polling and cell-phone movement data from 15 million people to argue that distrust of leaders can lead people to disbelieve real risks. The speaker also notes that Republicans were the more worried group when Ebola reached the United States under Obama. There is also an episode titled '‘Side Effects May Include…’: How We Can Make Medicine Better'. The arts and humanities get their own evenings. In 'Theater, Politics and Pedagogy in a Global Context', introduced by Catherine Corey, one guest describes moving on from Indian Ensemble, a collaborative company making new work, to start a second company that partners with groups in other regions and other languages. 'Who Has The Right to the City?' is a book discussion: Katja Arafa sets out the arguments of her new book on socially engaged public art, and two readers respond. Where to start depends on what a listener wants. The clock talk has the densest science. The stem cell panel and the public art discussion offer several voices in conversation. The subjects change from one recording to the next, but the setting does not: specialists, a live audience and, usually, a turn to questions.