NJIT Celebrates Largest Undergraduate Summer Research and Innovation Symposium
An independent, flexible, small sensor for breast tumor detection was the winner of the top Dr. James F. Stevenson Innovation Award at the 2024 Undergraduate Summer Research and Innovation (URI) Symposium at NJIT.
Isabella Frangiosa, a rising senior at Rowan University, said the inspiration of her device was “all the women who can't get easy access to mammograms and try to maybe build something, or start to build something that can help improve that problem.” Her device will use piezoelectric polymers, which generate charge in response to mechanical stress, and have much potential for sensing applications due to their excellent flexibility and ability to be self-powered.
She was one of more than 180 students — the largest in the history of the 12-year-old program — presenting projects in five different areas: bioscience and bioengineering, the environment and sustainability, material science and engineering, data science and management, and robotics and machine intelligence. Each gave a three-minute talk about their inventions.
Kara Thompson, a junior majoring in chemical engineering at NJIT, won second place for her project “Engineering a Multi-Chemistry Mixed Metal Oxide (MCMO) for Chemical Looping Combustion (CLC),” a process that will help generate cleaner energy. “Our hope is that once we get this finalized, that we can use it in industry, and it will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” said Thompson. “Our motivation behind it was really to help. Global warming is such a prominent issue at this time, so our motivation is to help reduce that and have a world to live in for future generations.”
This summer, she combined her research as she prepared for the upcoming women’s soccer season. “I had to go into the lab a good bit and do a bunch of stuff for research, but I had a few of my teammates here on campus doing research as well,” she said. “We would do workouts together outside of research. We would just be on the field whenever we weren't in the lab.”
Sudiksha Sahu, the third-place winner, is an Albert Dorman Honors Scholar and architecture major. Sahu developed a project that aims to assess spatial variations in indoor environmental quality (IEQ) at a real building and propose recommendations for optimal spatial resolution in IEQ measurements.
“IEQ encompasses all of the physical characteristics related to indoor environments that can affect our health, well-being, and performance, including thermal comfort, indoor air quality, lighting and acoustics,” noted Sahu. “Accurate measurements of IEQ are essential for ensuring a suitable indoor environment.”
Students spend 10 weeks conducting research in campus labs on topics ranging from platinum nanoparticles for cancer treatment, to biodegradation of groundwater pollutants, to artificial photosynthesis, to smart eyewear for patient registration. At the end, they present their projects in three-minute pitches to faculty, peers and members of the URI program’s external advisory board, which selects winners on the basis of content and presentation.
In lauding the student researchers, Atam Dhawan, NJIT’s senior vice provost for research and the program’s founder, promised the experience would prepare them for professional life in powerful ways.
“Resources aren’t handed to you ever in life. It’s very competitive,” he said, adding that convincing people about the merit of their ideas is a potent skill that requires them to “understand the value proposition to the people you’re pitching to, why it’s important to society, what’s innovative about it and who the competitors are.”
NJIT Provost John Pelesko noted that the “high-impact” program would enhance their performance in the classroom and their professional lives, further their understanding of the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary research and give them clearer career goals.
NJIT NAI Chapter Inducts New Members, Earns Excellence Award
On the second day of the program, the university held the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) – NJIT Innovation Day, in which new members were inducted to the campus chapter. NJIT President Teik Lim shared words of encouragement and appreciation for the student’s hard work these past ten weeks.
“Students tell me they want to become engineers. They want to become scientists. Why? To save the world, to save humanity, to serve humanity, and I think getting your research out there does exactly that,” he said. “After all, we are producing professionals like yourself to do what? To bring joy to living. Your job is to bring joy to living out of building bridges, creating gadgets, creating the next best biomedical solution.”
Amit Chakraborty, a principal scientist with Siemens Technology, gave the keynote speech. He focuses on the development in the emerging area of Hybrid Digital Twin. With this technology, industries such as the industrial sector, infrastructure, mobility and health care create virtual replicas of products, processes and services, allowing them to swiftly identify and resolve physical issues and design better products.
“Siemens is very active in multiple sectors, which is the industrial sector, infrastructure, mobility and health care,” he said. “Industrial would be factories, power plants and so on. Infrastructure would be, for example, smart buildings and the electric grid. Mobility is, of course, anything that helps you move from one location to another, it could be traffic systems or trains,” he noted.
Following his talk, Dhawan pointed to the connections Chakraborty made between fundamental physics and mathematics, computer simulations and applications, and how important they are to students.
“Many times they figure why they’re taking three courses in mathematics, but you showed them that there is a connection of using the physics of whatever the system is based on the fundamental understanding of mass, conservation of energy, to use those as boundary conditions for the simulation to create a digital twin,” he said.
NJIT’s NAI chapter recently received the organization’s inaugural Chapter of Excellence Award for programs that nurture and support inventions from their inception to translation, drawing on talent throughout the community: from undergraduates, to graduate students, to faculty.
Founded in 2021, the NJIT chapter quickly took on a larger role, as a regional hub to bring together researchers from other universities, policymakers and business leaders to share and disseminate ideas and forge partnerships to take on complex problems of national and international scale. At its meeting this past spring, for example, the chapter drew together for the first time the heads of research and innovation programs at eight universities in the metro region, including Princeton, Columbia and Rutgers, to discuss the benefits of collaborating on ideas, expertise and resources. As of the end of 2023, 13 NJIT professors have been inducted as NAI fellows.
On campus, the chapter promotes translational research and its commercialization through campus R&D programs, grants, clubs and acceleration programs; offers invention-focused networking and educational activities, such as workshops and seminars on innovation and intellectual property development; and provides mentoring and advising services to faculty and student inventors on further development of IP assets.
NJIT recently secured a $6 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to translate science and engineering discoveries into market-ready technologies that will improve quality of life in areas ranging from health care, to sustainable energy, to data privacy.
Awarded by the agency’s Directorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships, the grant will accelerate the development of promising prototypes and enable market validation and other commercialization activities. It will also strengthen the university’s entrepreneurial culture by funding and organizing training workshops in technology translation for undergraduates, Ph.D. students, post-doctoral researchers and faculty, through the newly created Center for Translational Research at NJIT.
Included in the article, reporting from Tracey Regan.
