Maurizio Porfiri
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Institute Professor
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Director of CUSP
Dr. Maurizio Porfiri is an Institute Professor at New York University Tandon School of Engineering, with tenured appointments at the Departments of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, and the Director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress of New York University. He received M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Engineering Mechanics from Virginia Tech, in 2000 and 2006; a “Laurea” in Electrical Engineering (with honors) and a Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Toulon (dual degree program), in 2001 and 2005, respectively. He has been on the faculty of the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department since 2006, when he founded the Dynamical Systems Laboratory.
Dr. Porfiri is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). He has served in the Editorial Board of ASME Journal of Dynamics systems, Measurements and Control, ASME Journal of Vibrations and Acoustics, Flow: Applications of Fluid Mechanics, IEEE Control Systems Letters, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I, IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, Mathematics in Engineering, and Mechatronics. Dr. Porfiri is engaged in conducting and supervising research on complex systems, with applications from mechanics to behavior, public health, and robotics.
He is the author of approximately 400 journal publications, including papers in Nature, Nature Human Behaviour, and Physical Review Letters. He was included in the “Brilliant 10” list of Popular Science in 2010 and his research featured in major media outlets, such as CNN, NPR, Scientific American, and Discovery Channel. Other significant recognitions include National Science Foundation CAREER award; invitations to the Frontiers of Engineering Symposium and the Japan-America Frontiers of Engineering Symposium organized by National Academy of Engineering; invitation to the third and fourth World Laureate Forums; the Outstanding Young Alumnus award by the college of Engineering of Virginia Tech; the ASME Gary Anderson Early Achievement Award; the ASME DSCD Young Investigator Award; the ASME C.D. Mote, Jr. Early Career Award; and the Research Excellence Award from New York University Tandon School of Engineering.
Sapienza University of Rome, 2001
Laurea (B.Sc./M.Sc.), Electrical Engineering
Sapienza University of Rome, 2005
Doctor of Philosophy, Theoretical and Applied Mechanics
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 2000
Master of Science, Engineering Mechanics
University of Toulon, 2005
Doctor of Philosophy, Theoretical and Applied Mechanics
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 2006
Doctor of Philosophy, Engineering Mechanics
NYU Tandon School of Engineering
Institute Professor
From: January 2020 to present
NYU Tandon School of Engineering
Professor
From: September 2014 to present
NYU Tandon School of Engineering
Associate Professor
From: September 2011 to August 2014
NYU Tandon School of Engineering
Assistant Professor
From: July 2006 to September 2011
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Post-Doctoral Associate
From: July 2005 to June 2006
Journal Articles (selection from the last ten years)
- Porfiri, M., 2020: "Validity and limitations of the detection matrix to determine hidden units and network size from perceptible dynamics", Physical Review Letters 124(16), 168301
- Porfiri, M., Sattanapalle, R. R., Nakayama, S., Macinko, J., Sipahi, R., 2019: "Media coverage and firearm acquisition in the aftermath of a mass shooting", Nature Human Behaviour 3(9), 913-921
- Zhang, P., Rosen, M., Peterson, S. D., Porfiri, M., 2018: "An information-theoretic approach to study fluid-structure interactions",Journal of Fluid Mechanics 848, 968-986
- Golovneva, O., Jeter, R., Belykh, I., Porfiri, M., 2017: "Windows of opportunity for synchronization in stochastically coupled maps",Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena 340, 1-13
- Zino, L., Rizzo, A., Porfiri, M., 2016: "Continuous-time discrete-distribution theory for activity-driven networks", Physical Review Letters 117(22), 228302
- Mwaffo, V., Anderson, R. P., Butail, S., Porfiri, M., 2015: "A jump persistent turning walker to model zebrafish locomotion", Journal of the Royal Society Interface 12(102), 20140884
- Cha, Y., Porfiri, M., 2014: "Mechanics and electrochemistry of ionic polymer metal composites", Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids 71, 156–178
- Panciroli, R., Porfiri, M., 2013: "Evaluation of the pressure field on a rigid body entering a quiescent fluid through particle image velocimetry", Experiments in Fluids 54(12), 1630
- Marras, S., Porfiri, M., 2012: "Fish and robots swimming together: attraction towards the robot demands biomimetic locomotion", Journal of the Royal Society Interface 9(73), 1856–1868
- Abaid, N., Porfiri, M., 2011: "Consensus over numerosity-constrained random networks", IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control 56(3), 649-654
- Aureli, M., Kopman, V., Porfiri, M., 2010: "Free-locomotion of underwater vehicles actuated by ionic polymer metal composites",IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics 15(4), 603-614
- Institute Professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, 2020
- ASME Fellow, 2019
- IEEE Fellow, Control Systems Society, 2019 ("For contributions to biomimetic robotics")
- ASME C.D. Mote, Jr. Early Career Award, 2015
- Invitee of Japan-America Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, National Academy of Engineering, 2014
- Jacobs Excellence in Education Award, 2014
- ASME Dynamic Systems & Control Division Young Investigator Award, 2013
- ASME Gary Anderson Early Achievement Award, 2013
- Outstanding Young Alumnus, College of Engineering Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2012
- Best student paper competition award at the 2012 ASME Conference on Smart Materials, Adaptive Structures and Intelligent Systems (with graduate students Youngsu Cha and Matteo Aureli)
- Invited speaker for the “lectio magistralis” at “Sapienza Ricerca”, 2011
- Best paper award at the 2011 ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Conference (with graduate student Nicole Abaid)
- Invitee of Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, National Academy of Engineering, 2011
- Jacobs Excellence in Education Award, 2011
- Popular Science "Brilliant Ten", 2010
- Best robotics paper award at the 2009 ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Conference (with graduate students Matteo Aureli and Vladislav Kopman)
- NSF Career award (Dynamical systems), 2008
- H2CU medal, 2008
Research Briefs
High-profile incidents of police brutality sway public opinion more than performance of people’s local law enforcement, new study from NYU Tandon reveals
National media coverage of police brutality influences public perceptions of law enforcement more than the performance of people’s local police departments, according to data analysis from NYU Tandon School of Engineering, challenging the assumption that public confidence in police depends mostly on feeling safe from local crime.
In a study published in Communications Psychology, a NYU Tandon research team tracked media coverage of police brutality in 18 metropolitan areas in the United States — along with coverage of local crimes — and analyzed tweets from those cities to tease out positive attitudes from negative ones towards the police.
Led by Maurizio Porfiri, Institute Professor and Director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), the team found when high-profile cases of police brutality make the news, negative sentiment and distrust towards police spikes across cities, even if the incident occurred in another state.
In contrast, local media coverage of crimes in people's own cities had little sway over their views of the police. Porfiri discussed the research and its implications in a blog post.
“Our research shows that police misconduct occurring anywhere reverberates across the country, while performance of police in their own communities contribute minimally towards attitudes around those local police departments,” said Rayan Succar, a Ph.D. candidate in Mechanical Engineering and CUSP who is the paper’s lead author. “The pattern holds steady across diverse cities.”
To reach their conclusions, researchers employed transfer entropy — an advanced statistical technique that allowed them to detect causal relationships within complex systems that change over time — in their analysis of more than 2.5 million geo-localized tweets. The approach allows for significantly more time-sensitive analysis of public sentiment than standard surveys which are constrained to the point in time at which they are fielded.
“By comparing this time series tracking shifts in sentiment to parallel time series documenting volumes of media coverage about local crime and national police brutality news, transfer entropy quantified causal relationships between media coverage and Twitter discourse about law enforcement,” said Salvador Ramallo, Fulbright Scholar from the University of Murcia in Spain and a visiting member of CUSP who is part of the research team.
The researchers assembled their data from the period October 1, 2010 to December 31, 2020. With a time resolution of one minute, the team collected tweets in each metropolitan area that contained the words “police,” “cop,” or the local police department name abbreviation of the main city in the metropolitan area (“NYPD” for New York Police Department).
In that same time frame, researchers collected coverage of police brutality and of local crime from 17 of the 20 most circulated newspapers.
To better detail the interplay between media coverage and public sentiment, the researchers also zeroed in on a two-week period around the heavily-covered George Floyd murder, a notorious example of extreme police brutality. Specifically, they scraped the Twitter feeds of the top 10 most-followed newspaper profiles and created a time series of police brutality coverage from May 29, 2020 until June 13, 2020.
This highly resolved time series was examined in conjunction with the time series of negative tweets about the police for each of the 18 metropolitan areas during the same two-week time window.
“The research reveals how profoundly a single incident of police violence can rupture public trust in police everywhere,” said CUSP postdoctoral fellow Roni Barak Ventura, a member of the research team. “The findings suggest that to improve perceptions, police departments may need to prioritize transparency around misconduct allegations as much as local crime fighting. More community dialogue and balanced media coverage may also help build understanding between police and the public they serve.”
This study is the latest in a series that Porfiri is pursuing under a 2020 National Science Foundation grant awarded to study the “firearm ecosystem” in the United States. His research employs sophisticated data analytics to investigate the firearm ecosystem on three different scales. On the macroscale, research illuminates cause-and-effect relationships between firearm prevalence and firearm-related harms. On the mesoscale, the project explores the ideological, economic, and political landscape underlying state approaches to firearm safety. On the microscale, research delves into individual opinions about firearm safety.
Porfiri’s prior published research has focused on motivations of fame-seeking mass shooters, factors that prompt gun purchases, state-by-state gun ownership trends, and forecasting monthly gun homicide rates.
CUSP postdoctoral fellow Rishita Das also contributed to the study.
Succar, R., Ramallo, S., Das, R. et al. Understanding the role of media in the formation of public sentiment towards the police. Commun Psychol 2, 11 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-024-00059-8
Authors
- Maurizio Porfiri
Asylum seekers’ mental health benefits from sheltering in refugee centers, new study reveals
Sheltering in refugee centers can positively impact asylum seekers’ mental health, according to a new study published in Communications Medicine, underscoring the benefits of providing migrants safe and welcoming transitional environments in which professionals in the host countries monitor their psychological and physical needs.
The study’s multidisciplinary research team, coordinated by Emanuele Caroppo — Head of International Projects and Researches at the Department of Mental Health Asl Roma 2 — administered a battery of six questionnaires, ranging from demographic surveys to comprehensive psychological assessments, to a cohort of 100 asylum-seekers in 14-day COVID-19-related quarantines in Italy between August 2020 and September 2021.
Maurizio Porfiri, NYU Tandon Institute Professor and Director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), designed the framework for the statistical analysis and led the interpretation of the results. He and Pietro De Lellis, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at University of Naples Federico II, are the corresponding authors on the paper.
The study’s aim was to understand the impact of the first contact with the reception system on the mental health of asylum-seekers, and to delve into predictors of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among that population.
Twenty-three percent of asylum-seekers in the study had PTSD — higher than the 4 to 10% incidence previously reported among the general global population. Pre-migration traumatic experiences were the key influencers in the the development of PTSD, including the infliction of bodily injury and torture, and witnessing violence. The study found no specific demographic factors that played a crucial role in predicting PTSD. Social ties and education levels did not emerge as salient features to predict the onset of PTSD.
Despite the incidence of PTSD, the authors also observed that a 14-day stay in reception facilities appeared to positively impact asylum-seekers’ mental health, with the proportion of participants needing to undergo further psychological assessments decreasing from 51% to 21% throughout the quarantine period.
The study offers a significant step towards understanding the relationship between migration, mental health, and the reception environment. Asylum-seekers, who have already endured tremendous hardship, may find a glimmer of hope in the notion that a supportive and secure environment can significantly contribute to their psychological well-being.
Along with Porfiri, De Lellis and Caroppo, the study’s researchers are Carmela Calabrese, Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, University of Naples Federico II and the Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes (INS), Aix Marseille Université; Marianna Mazza, Institute of Psychiatry and Psychology, Department of Geriatrics, Neuroscience and Orthopedics, Fondazione Policlinico Universitario A. Gemelli IRCCS and Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Department of Psychiatry, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore; Alessandro Rinaldi, Migrant Health Unit, Local Health Authority Roma; Daniele Coluzzi, Migrant Health Unit, Local Health Authority Roma; Pierangela Napoli, Migrant Health Unit, Local Health Authority Roma; Martina Sapienza, Department of Life Sciences and Public Health, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore; and the UOC Salute Mentale Asl Roma 2 in Rome, Italy.
Caroppo, E., Calabrese, C., Mazza, M. et al. Migrants’ mental health recovery in Italian reception facilities. Commun Med 3, 162 (2023)
Authors
- Maurizio Porfiri
Spiropyran-functionalized photochromic nylon webbings for long-term ultraviolet light sensing
This research was performed under the direction of Maurizio Porfiri, Institute Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Civil and Urban Engineering and incoming Director of the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) at NYU Tandon. Collaborators were Peng Zhang, former researcher in Porfiri’s group and now faculty member at Tennessee Tech, and John Ohanian, research scientist at Luna Innovations.
Webbing structures — from chin straps and parachute material, to space habitats — are extensively employed in engineering systems as load-bearing components. They are frequently subjected to extended ultraviolet (UV) light irradiation, which can affect their integrity and reduce their mechanical strength. Despite technological advancements in structural health monitoring, long-term UV sensing techniques for webbings remain under-developed.
In the study, "Spiropyran-functionalized photochromic nylon webbings for long-term ultraviolet light sensing," published as the lead research (and featured cover) in the Journal of Applied Physics, the investigators explored an enticing solution: a photochromic nylon webbing that, because it comprises spiropyran (SP) functionalized polymers, demonstrates color variation in response to extended UV exposure with controlled, color variation over multiple time scales that is conducive to UV sensing.
The team developed a mathematical model grounded in photochemistry to interpret experimental observations, unveiling the photochromic phenomenon as a multi-step, multi-timescale photochemical process involving several chemical species offering the basis for the inference of the webbing’s color
In their research, the team found that the decay rate of the webbings’ color demonstrated a dependence on the initial concentration of the SP dye. Webbings with the lowest dye concentration maintained sensitivity for four weeks, whereas at the highest dye concentration, they exhibited sensing capability after eight weeks. Thus dye concentration could be customized to meet the lifetime of the targeted applications.
The proposed photochromic webbing and the photochemistry-based mathematical model could inform future designs of UV-sensitive structures that maintain sensitivity under weeks of continuous sunlight UV exposure.
Authors
- Maurizio Porfiri
Hydrodynamic model of fish orientation in a channel flow
This research was led by Maurizio Porfiri, Institute Professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, civil and urban engineering, and biomedical, and a member of the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) at NYU Tandon. Co-authors are Post-Doctoral Associate Peng Zhang of the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NYU Tandon and CUSP, and Sean D. Peterson of the University of Waterloo.
For over a century, scientists have sought to understand how fish orient against an incoming flow, even without visual and flow cues. In this study the researchers explore a potential hydrodynamic mechanism of fish rheotaxis — movement away or toward water currents — through the study of the bidirectional coupling between fish and the surrounding fluid.
The researchers point out that a major contribution of the proposed model is the treatment of the fish as an invasive sensor that both reacts to and influences the background flow, thereby establishing a coupled interaction between the fish and the surrounding environment.
By modeling a fish as a vortex dipole, a jet flow with a system of two vortices, in an infinite channel with an imposed background flow, they established a dynamical system that captures the existence of a critical flow speed for fish to successfully orient while performing cross-stream, periodic sweeping movements.
The researcher's juxtaposed their models with experimental observations in the literature on the rheotactic behavior of fish deprived of visual and lateral line cues. The crucial role of bidirectional hydrodynamic interactions unveiled by this model points at an overlooked limitation of existing experimental paradigms to study rheotaxis in the laboratory.
Authors
- Maurizio Porfiri