Private Foundations & Organizations

Simons Foundation  

PD- Pivot Research

Climate Change Research Support: From Galaxy Evolution to Climate Models: A data driven journey 

$18,594 
08/30/2024–09/01/2025 

Viviana Acquaviva – Physics Department 

Modeling the Earth is crucial to understanding climate variability and climate change, allocating resources for adaptation, and formulating policies that affect our lives. As a Simons Foundation Pivot Fellow, Viviana Acquaviva’s goal is to bring the numerical modeling, statistics, and machine learning skills that she currently uses in astrophysics to develop better models of the Earth. Better models mean more accurate predictions of future Earth’s conditions, improved extrapolation in data-poor regimes and regions, faster emulation in data-rich but computationally intensive regimes, validation of numerical approximations, uncertainty quantification, and dimensionality reduction to foster physical understanding. At the end of her fellowship, she hopes to understand the different components of a climate model (cryosphere, atmosphere, ocean, land) and how they interact with each other in order to select her own research questions to pursue. 

Robin Hood Foundation 

City Tech Learning Recovery Program 
$1,990,000
07/001/2021-12/31/2024 

Reginald Blake – Associate Provost and Dean of Curriculum and Research 
Hamidreza Norouzi – Construction Management/Civil Engineering Technology Department
Diana Samaroo – Chemistry Department 

The Robin Hood Foundation has awarded City Tech a year-long grant focusing on incoming first year students who are starting their college career in 2021-2022.  This special initiative is to engender learning gains among pandemic-impacted, incoming first year students, as well as to increase persistence that leads to graduation. In partnership with extant programs throughout the college, the Robin Hood funding will be used to provide a comprehensive, coordinated, holistic, and integrated set of opportunities for first semester students — all of which we hope will lead to a successful first year of college for these students.

Ausable Freshwater Center

Survey of Climate Change in Adirondak Lake Ecosystems (SCALE) Pilot 
09/01/2022–03/31/2025
$100,000

Marzi Azarderakhsh – Construction Management/Civil Engineering Technology Department 
Hamidreza Norouzi – Construction Management/Civil Engineering Technology Department 
 
CUNY team shall participate in the collaborative scientific undertaking by leading the efforts of using satellite remote sensing observations for the project. The work will include studying and processing satellite images over number of lakes in the Adirondack Park over the past 4 decades. The team will be responsible for collecting and interpreting key climate factors such as temperature, ice cover, and watercolor results. The team will conduct limited validation of remote sensing observations against prior field measurements in the park. Finally, the CUNY team will be responsible to explore some satellite-based observations and algorithms for studying the impact of climate change on the lakes as a pilot project for future comprehensive studies. 

Modern Language Association 

Spanish Medical Interpretation and Healthcare Communication Curriculum Modifications for Future Language-Concordant Professionals 
$10,000 
03/14/2024–02/28/2025 

David Sanchez-Jimenez –Humanities Department 
Noemi Rodriguez – Health Sciences Department 

The Humanities Department, in partnership with the Health Sciences Department at City Tech, proposed a 11-moonth project to create a new medical Spanish course entitled SPA 3202 Spanish Medical Interpretation and Healthcare Communication, which will be the top course for the future interdisciplinary academic minor, Hispanic Serving Health Professionals. The major objective of the project is to provide specific knowledge of healthcare, a wide array of relevant medical Spanish terminology and medical interpretation skills for Spanish/English bilingual healthcare students to become language-concordant professionals. This will enable them to communicate effectively when providing medical care and attention to English and/or Spanish-speaking patients in medical settings. In addition, this valuable knowledge will boost their career opportunities in the country’s multilingual settings and in other parts of the world.  

National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO)

Student Observing Support (SOS) 
$39,975 
03/01/2024–02/28/2026 

Charlotte Welker – Physics Department 
 

LSST Catalyst Fellowship

$558,239 
08/25/2023–08/24/2027 

Charlotte Welker – Physics Department