NJIT Launches Center for Translational Research

With the recent launch of its Center for Translational Research, NJIT is promising to quicken the pace of converting lab research into beneficial, market-ready products and services.

The center will serve as a hub for commercialization training and development on campus, but also as a meeting place to generate ideas and formulate new approaches for addressing unmet needs in areas ranging from health care, to sustainable energy and environmental remediation, to data privacy. Through workshops, symposia and demonstration events, NJIT plans to draw external collaborators, advisors and investors, as well as people in the community with their own thoughts about what’s needed, said Atam Dhawan, senior vice provost for research and the new center’s director.

“We have a responsibility to drive innovation from the campus to market,” Dhawan said at a ribbon-cutting in NJIT’s VentureLink building. The event was attended by NJIT researchers, members of the university’s board of trustees and collaborators and advisors from academia, government and industry.

The initiative is funded in part by a $6 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to advance translational research. 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. 

The center includes such facilities as the Microfabrication Innovation Center for making prototypes and the Microdevices Translational Research Center in NJIT’s VentureLink complex. The latter will include patient beds for health care device testing and an observation room for investors. Through the center, the grant will fund postdoctoral researchers who provide technical support to projects and to students in NJIT’s Undergraduate Research and Innovation (URI) program who help advance them over the URI summer session.

At the ceremony, NJIT President Teik C. Lim stressed the importance of external engagement as part of a holistic education for students. “We are building a campus of the future,” he said.

Provost John Pelesko noted that the new programming “gives us a huge head start … on what we want to be.”

The NSF grant, Dhawan explained, is designed to bolster NJIT’s Technology Innovation Translation Acceleration (TITA) program, which drills down on the potential commercial benefits of university research at earlier stages of the translation and market validation process. Launched by his office last year, TITA provides seed grants of up to $75,000 per project over three phases of development, as well as guidance and feedback from an industrial advisory board composed of inventors and entrepreneurs. Inventors must have external partners.

Over the next four years, the new NSF grant will enable seed funding of $50,000 to $100,000 per project to up to 10 TITA research teams to help them develop and validate translational research and identify pathways to commercialization. It will provide, for example, backing to help developers move past the initial proof of concept, including determining interest and acceptance by potential users, to identify purchasers of the technology, such as clinicians, businesses or communities.

So far, nine projects have been awarded TITA grants under the current NJIT program. Sagnik Basuray, an associate professor of chemical engineering, for example, is developing a modular, point-of-care microfluidic device capable of quickly detecting multiple animal-borne diseases, including infectious diseases that can be transmitted between animals and humans. He noted that 75% of emerging pathogens originate in animals. “If we can measure them in the field easily inexpensively and quickly, we can prevent spillovers,” he said.

Salam Daher, an assistant professor of informatics, is working on software and hardware that will measure irregularly shaped wounds accurately and create customized wound dressings. “Healthcare workers are still using rulers and Q-tips to measure wounds,” she noted. “We use 3D-tracking technology. We can also simulate the progression of healing.”

Two TITA teams are also developing technologies that will detect and destroy the industrial compounds per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). The first is a highly sensitive and selective portable sensor capable of detecting and quantifying PFAS at current federal limits in treated water. It will be extended to detection in field samples in the future. The second is a reactor that uses ultrasound and argon nanobubbles to disintegrate the contaminants, among others.

Princeton has been named as the mentor university for the NSF program involving NJIT and the University of Delaware, which also received funding.

“Princeton’s involvement underscores the importance of partnerships and collaboration to raise the bar for everyone,” Princeton’s Vice Dean for Innovation, Craig B. Arnold, who is also the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, said earlier this year. “We are excited to collaborate with NJIT and the University of Delaware to drive forward an initiative that benefits the entire northeast region.”

Brian Kiernan ’70, the chair of the URI Advisory Board and a longtime technology mentor, applauded the new initiative.

NJIT Board of Trustees Chair Robert Cohen '83, '84, '87, the president of Digital, Robotics and Enabling Technologies at Stryker, emphasized the role of collaboration in advancing innovations from bench to market.

‘When I think of translational research, I see a great opportunity when it comes to infrastructure,” noted Nick DeNichilo ’73, ’78, co-vice chair of the board who recently retired as the president and CEO of Mott MacDonald. Among other examples, he mentioned the use of AI in a recent lead reduction project to locate areas for abatement, including poorer neighborhoods that are often neglected. “This tells how to best spend our money,” he said.