Ninad Pandit, Assistant Professor of History, is an architect, urban planner and a historian of modern South Asia. He is also an Affiliated Faculty in the Cooper Union’s School of Architecture. His scholarship examines the relationships between urbanization, industrialization and the emergence of radical politics in colonial India. 

Currently, Ninad is working on The Bombay Radicals, a book project that tells the story of the origins of the working-class movement and the Left in colonial western India and argues that the process of translating ideas of communism and mass mobilization for use in colonial contexts produced new knowledge about organizing workers and developed new strategies for unionizing, striking, and providing strike relief. It also argues that this knowledge was critical in developing a new kind of mass politics in colonial India, one that shaped popular mobilizations led by M. K. Gandhi in the 1930s and 1940s. Finally, the book shows how the rise of Gandhi’s nationalist urban mass mobilizations led to a decline in the popular support for the Left, ultimately paving the way for a new, right-wing, xenophobic political campaign.

At the Cooper Union, Ninad teaches courses on the history of the modern world in the HSS Core Curriculum and electives on urban histories and migration in the global south. He also teaches in the School of Architecture’s History Core and occasionally offers Architecture electives. 

Ninad received his PhD from the Department of History at Princeton University. He also holds professional degrees in City Planning/Design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in Architecture from the University of Mumbai. He was previously the Singh Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University, and a Mellon Fellow in Cities and the Humanities at LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Professor Philip Yecko's main area of interest is fluid dynamics. Phil has worked on astrophysical, biological, geophysical, magnetic and multi-phase fluid dynamics, studying flows of accretion disks, atomization and sprays, bubbles, droplets, coherent structures, mixing and vortices in the ocean, convection, pulsation and turbulence in stars, magnetic drug delivery, ferrofluids, suspension rheology and pattern-forming instabilities. Students interested in this sort of research are encouraged to get involved.

Prof. Yecko's research benefits from a three-fold approach: combining mathematical and theoretical methods, such as asymptotic models and stability theory, together with computational models, including direct numerical simulations, and laboratory experiments. Phil has an ongoing experimental program at the Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Lab, and is a regular participant in the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics summer program at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (GFD). Phil also has active collaborations with researchers in Italy, France and at several U.S. universities.

Phil enjoys teaching a wide variety of courses in fluids, physics, astrophysics, nonlinear dynamics and numerical modeling and simulation, and has previously taught at Trinity College Dublin, Columbia, M.I.T., Montclair State and Università Napoli Federico II, Italy, primarily undergraduate but also graduate and PhD level courses. Most recently, Phil has developed and taught a hybrid-online course in advanced computational modeling and, at Cooper, is teaching Physics Lab and Modern Physics.

Prof. Philip Yecko earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University and his S.B. in physics from M.I.T.

Tommy George holds a Ph.D. in materials science from Harvard University, specializing in electrochemistry. Electrochemistry enables the precise control of chemical reactions using electric current and voltage, making it possible to store and release renewable energy in batteries, to electrify and decarbonize the chemical industry, and to design sensors and analytical methods with exceptional sensitivity. 

Dr. George's graduate research has focused on aqueous redox flow batteries that can charge and discharge reliably for years, as well as other electrochemical technologies designed for a more sustainable future. They were also a Pedagogy Fellow with Harvard's Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, where they served as a peer mentor for graduate students in teaching positions and engaged in research on science and engineering education. 

Dr. George received a B.S. in chemical engineering from Tufts University, where they began undergraduate research on the electrochemistry of hydrogen fuel cells. While in college, they also designed and taught weekly hands-on engineering lessons for local public elementary schools. 

Michael Young is an architect and educator practicing in New York City where he is a founding partner of the architectural design studio Young & Ayata. Young & Ayata have received the Progressive Architecture award, the Design Vanguard Award, the Young Architects Prize, and a first-place prize for the design of the Bauhaus Museum in Dessau, Germany. Their work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art-New York, the Istanbul Modern, the Graham Foundation, SCI-Arc and Princeton University. Michael has published numerous essays and the books The Estranged Object (Graham Foundation, 2015) and Reality Modeled After Images (Routledge, 2021). He was the 2019-20 Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

Michael earned his MArch II degree from Princeton University and his BArch from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He is a registered architect in the State of New York.

View Michael Young's CV here.