LunaTech, a web application where players can learn about space from a cartoon cat and send their professors into orbit, won first place in GirlHacks 2023 at New Jersey Institute of Technology.

The application is the brainchild of Fizah Fahad, Adrianna Rust and Ayushi Sangoi, who combined to win a $1,500 cash prize for their efforts. The trio coded in CSS, JavaScript, Python and a NASA programming interface.

New Jersey Institute of Technology is the second-highest ranked public university in the Wall Street Journal/College Pulse 2024 list of the Best Colleges in the U.S.

At No. 19 nationally, NJIT is second only to the University of Florida among public universities nationally and to Princeton University among colleges and universities in New Jersey. 

New Jersey Institute of Technology rose 13 spots to no. 88 among national universities in a ranking based on overall value, service and social mobility, as determined by the non-profit Washington Monthly magazine.

The publication’s editors emphasized that such categories are important alternatives to traditional college rankings that tend to favor wealthy, private institutions.

NJIT welcomed its Class of 2027 during this year’s University Convocation, where first-year students from all schools were in attendance.

The new academic year has kicked off with a record number of students enrolled. Helping to fuel the new high water mark are 1,805 first-year students— an increase of 23% from the previous year — as of Sept. 1. This year’s incoming freshman class is the largest and most diverse in school history. 

A little-known R&D facility, operated by NJIT’s New Jersey Innovation Institute with the U.S. Army Picatinny Arsenal for its primary client, is beginning to thrive one year after moving off-campus.

The facility is called COMET — Collaborative Operationalized Manufacturing Engineering and Training — located about 30 miles northwest of NJIT’s Newark campus, close to Picatinny, which is the Army headquarters for conventional weapons development.

Stuti Mohan, a senior biomedical engineering student, was the winner of the top Dr. James F. Stevenson Innovation Award at the 2023 Undergraduate Summer Research and Innovation (URI) Symposium at NJIT.

Her project sought to identify a non-invasive yet precise method to diagnose the tapping foot of a subject. Mohan’s research area in the Sensorimotor Quantification and Rehabilitation Lab (SQRL) is the ongoing pursuit of improving concussion management.