Bei Wu
Dean’s Professor in Global Health, NYU
Director, Global Health & Aging Research
Director for Research, Hartford Institute for Geriatric Nursing
Affiliated Professor, Ashman Department of Periodontology & Implant Dentistry
Bei Wu, PhD, is an inaugural co-director of the Aging Incubator at New York University. She holds the position of dean’s professor in global health and director of global health and aging research at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing. She is also the director of research at the Hartford Institute for Geriatric Nursing at NYU. As a principal investigator, she has led a significant number of projects supported by federal agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She is leading an ongoing NIH-funded clinical trial to improve oral health for persons with cognitive impairment.
Wu is an internationally known leader in gerontology. Her career in gerontology has been distinguished by interdisciplinary collaborations with researchers in various disciplines, including nursing and dentistry, at many academic institutions and organizations in the United States and abroad. Her research areas cover a wide range of topics related to aging and global health, including oral health, long-term care, dementia, and caregiving. She has published over 400 peer-reviewed papers, books, and conference abstracts and has delivered presentations at hundreds of conferences as an invited speaker. She has mentored hundreds of faculty members, visiting scholars, and students from various disciplines, including nursing, gerontology, dentistry, medicine, social work, demography, public health, sociology, public policy, geography, and economics.
Wu is a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, Association for Gerontology in Higher Education, and the New York Academy of Medicine. She is an Honorary Member of the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International. Wu is the former president of the Geriatric Oral Research Group of the International Association for Dental Research. She has served on a number of NIH review panels and is a frequent reviewer for multiple international funding agencies. She was honored as the 2017 IADR Distinguished Scientist in Geriatric Oral Research.
Wu earned her PhD and MS in Gerontology from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and BS from Shanghai University.
Sebastian Cherng
Associate Professor of International Education, NYU
Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng is a sociologist whose scholarly and community-based work focuses on the social lives of marginalized youth. His interests include comparative perspectives on race/ethnicity and migration (with a focus on China and the US) and social capital within the school and educational context.
As such, his research examines the social relationships in the lives of minority and immigrant adolescents in the US, gender, ethnic, and migrant differences in education in China, and cultural and social capital transfers between adolescents in the US. His scholarship has appeared in journals such as American Educational Research Journal, Social Forces, and Teachers College Record.
Cherng received his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 2014, and he has also taught in a charter middle school in San Francisco and a college in Anhui, China.
Zhan Guo
Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Transportation Policy
Zhan Guo studies individuals’ travel behavior and explores innovative ways to influence that decision-making process to produce better social outcomes such as reduced congestion and carbon emissions. At the micro level, he focuses how travelers perceive travel alternatives and attributes and what discrepancies exist between perception and reality. The ability to reinforce, change, or even deceive that perception to promote the “right” behavior, and the methods used to do so, also figure largely in his research. At the macro level, he is interested in the effect of regulations, such as parking and street standards, mandatory affordable housing, and speed limit, on accessibility, equity, and safety, with a special focus on the (dis)connection between these regulations, market forces, and consumer preferences. Zhan has conducted empirical work in Boston, London, Washington DC, New York, San Francisco, Hong Kong, etc. His work has been covered by New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, BBC, Economist, Le Monde, ABC Evening News, XInhua News Agency, People’s Daily, the Atlantic Cities, Nudges.org, etc.
Zhan Guo received a B. Arch from Tianjin University, a MUD from Tsinghua University, China, and a MCP and a Ph.D in Urban Planning from MIT.