NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) has awarded 10 Covid-19 Facilitator Research Grants to faculty across a range of disciplines including sciences, engineering, and social sciences.
These grants are designed to support academic research with the potential to mitigate the impact of Covid-19, and come as part of the university’s global efforts in combating the pandemic in the UAE and around the world.
The 10 selected projects focus on a wide range of disciplines; these include medical approaches to Covid-19 detection, diagnostic tools to support screening efforts, understanding of the transmission of the virus, policy analysis and the collection of data to support government responses to the crisis and its impact on personal and social health, as well as labour impact and global supply chain, among other research areas.
Amongst the innovations being developed at the university, assistant professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering Mohammad Qasaimeh is producing a low cost, wearable smart adhesive bandage for the dual detection of the immune response to severe acute respiratory syndrome as well as the presence of the Covid-19 in the finger-prick blood drop.
Yong-Ak (Rafael) Song, who is also an associate professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering is looking to develop a simple and inexpensive microfluidic chip that can extract RNA’s (a nucleic acid present in all living cells) from patient samples and detect the target RNA rapidly.
The university’s professors are working on numerous other innovations and solutions that include investigating the mechanism of the Sars-Cov2 replication and how certain viral proteins affect and influence host cell function after viral infection in collaboration.
NYUAD has been collaborating with key institutions in the UAE including Mubadala Healthcare, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, and the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi, among others, to tackle the global pandemic.
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