Albert Dorman Honors College

An interdisciplinary engineering team developing an enzyme-blocking drug designed to reduce levels of LDL, or “bad cholesterol,” was the winner of this year’s TechQuest challenge, announced this week at NJIT’s sixth annual Innovation Day. Senior Victoria Harbour, a chemical engineering major, and junior Patricia Iglesias-Montoro, a biomedical engineering student, (below) are synthesizing and testing a small molecule, hydrogel therapy to prevent PCSK9, an enzyme circulating in the bloodstream, from interfering with the body’s mechanisms for metabolizing cholesterol. The pair notes that...

Innovation Day is a showcase of cutting-edge, student-led research that includes inventions that improve lives, novel business ideas, computer games and fundamental scientific research. This year, nearly three dozen student projects – from mapping applications for the transportation industry, to human control interfaces for surrogate robots, to novel drugs that target cholesterol – will be on display in the Campus Center on April 10. A growing number of these undergraduate researchers are taking their innovations on the road: to technology conferences, along commercialization pathways such...

“One of the things that I’m pretty passionate about is women being competitive and not having negative connotations around being competitive… I think that sometimes women don’t embrace that enough,” said Erika Taugher ’08, ’09, a star soccer alumna who earned a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering and a master’s in international business. “Being competitive, I think it gives you an advantage and I think it helps to motivate you… For me it gives me some fire, and that definitely applied on the soccer field and…at NJIT in terms of wanting to get top grades.” Taugher brings that same spirit...

The Murray Center for Women in Technology at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) will hold a one-day Women Designing the Future conference—“The Environment: Doing More with Less”—on Friday, March 23. Registration begins at 8:30 a.m. in the university’s Campus Center Ballrooms A and B. Conference participants will have opportunities to interact with women scientists, government leaders, entrepreneurs and social justice activists as they outline the near-future challenges posed by accelerating climate change, including disaster preparedness and basic food and water security....