Tulika Das, a biomedical engineer who aspires to discover new treatments for traumatic brain injury, confronted her own health care conundrum this summer just as she was making the leap from master’s to doctoral student: She lost her job in the pandemic-driven shutdown, landed in the hospital after suffering an allergic reaction and found herself short of funds to cover her co-payment.

Donald “Will” Andrews, NJIT’s first-ever recipient of the Humanity in Action Fellowship, attributes his selection for the distinguished summertime program to his choice of study at the university: industrial engineering.

“There probably weren’t that many engineers that applied … so that made my application stand out from the start — like, ‘hey, look, we have an engineer from Kentucky applying for this social sciences fellowship in Europe,’” said Andrews laughingly.

Exploring remote, exotic locations is a long-standing tradition among college students. For applied physics major Samantha Lomuscio ’20, that destination during her senior year has been Jupiter, nearly 390 million miles away.

Working with astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), where she began conducting high-energy astrophysics research last summer, her goal has been to detect the solar system’s largest planet in a way that has never been done successfully — through gamma-ray emissions.