Professor Nikhil Gupta is appointed to the editorial board of a Nature journal
Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Nikhil Gupta already has a string of titles and honors affixed to his name. Also a faculty member in the Department of Civil and Urban Engineering, the NYU Center for Cybersecurity, and the Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications (CATT), he is the Director of Tandon’s Composite Materials and Mechanics Laboratory, a Fellow of both ASM International and the American Society for Composites, and an elected Senior Member of both IEEE and the National Academy of Inventors.
Now, there is a new entry on that list: editorial board member of Scientific Data, a multidisciplinary journal published by Nature for which he will handle manuscripts for peer review. An open-source journal, Scientific Data provides a framework for data-sharing to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery. “In particular, training AI models requires large datasets,” Gupta explains, “so publications like this are now in great demand.”
The journal operates on what are known as “FAIR Principles” for scientific data management and stewardship, which state that research data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. To be truly reusable, the data must be evaluated to assure that it was obtained in an academically rigorous, verifiable way, and that’s where editorial board members, each a domain expert, come in.
While the journal includes datasets from all areas of natural sciences, medicine, engineering and social sciences, Gupta — whose own research has encompassed ways to make additive manufacturing processes easier to monitor and biomedical hydrogels more clinically effective, among other projects — will be focused on those related to materials science, working to ensure that any submissions adhere to high scientific standards.
“I’m happy to have this role at a journal dedicated to breaking down barriers to interdisciplinary research,” he says. “It’s a responsibility I take very seriously.”
