This sponsored article is brought to you by NYU Tandon School of Engineering. The traditional approach to academic research goes something like this: Assemble experts from a discipline, put them in a building, and hope something useful emerges. Biology departments do biology. Engineering departments do engineering. Medical schools treat patients. NYU is turning that model inside out. At its new Institute for Engineering Health, the organizing principle centers around disease states rather than traditional disciplines. Instead of asking “what can electrical engineers contribute to medicine?,” they’re asking “what would it take to cure allergic asthma?,” and then assembling whoever can answer that question, whether they’re immunologists, computational biologists, materials scientists, AI researchers, or wireless communications engineers.

Jeffrey Hubbell, NYU’s vice president for bioengineering strategy and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering.New York University The early results suggest they’re onto something. A chemical engineer and an electrical engineer collaborated to build a device that detects airborne threats — including…