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Girlhacks 2025 continued its legacy of providing a place for women and non-binary students in technology to take the lead in bringing ideation to realization through its annual 24-hour Major League Hacking (MLH) sanctioned hackathon where everyone — including the men — are invited to compete.

Scholarships help many students get to college, but for Jonathan Kozlik a scholarship to New Jersey Institute of Technology led him to a technical conference in Florida, where he found inspiration to form his own company testing the security of other people’s artificial intelligence applications.

New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) is the top public university in New Jersey for both value and alumni salary outcomes, according to the newly released Wall Street Journal/College Pulse “2026 Best Colleges” rankings.

NJIT achieved strong placement in categories that highlight return on investment and long-term success:

Assistant Professor Shantanu Sharma and Ph.D. student Komal Kumari in the Ying Wu College of Computing’s Department of Computer Science have devised a solution to secure document systems beyond standard encryption. The research has been published in VLDB Conference (Very Large Data Bases), a premier forum for data management, scalable data science, and database researchers.

New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) has climbed to No. 80 — its highest-ever placement — in the 2026 U.S. News & World Report Best National Universities rankings, continuing its steady ascent among the nation’s leading institutions.

The new placement marks a four-spot rise from last year and a 23-place improvement over the past five years, underscoring NJIT’s growing national reputation for academic excellence, innovation, student success and affordability.

Ying Wu College of Computing (YWCC) proudly welcomes six recently appointed assistant professors to the departments of Computer Science and Data Science for the 2025-2026 academic year. These individuals all bring unique expertise that will transform research and experiential learning during a time of change amidst rapidly evolving technology.

NJIT-YWCC has a mission to keep pace with rapid advancements in the technology revolution across all computing disciplines and is poised to continue its forward trajectory with the addition of these new members of the faculty.

Senior Lecturer Fuad Hamidli in Ying Wu College of Computing’s Department of Computer Science participated as a panelist at AARP New Jersey’s 2025 Fraud Summit: Decoding Fraud in the Age of AI. He previously spoke at the AARP Fraud Summit: Fraud 360 – Awareness, Prevention & Recovery in spring 2025

More than 3,300 students and alumni filled the Joel & Diane Bloom Wellness and Events Center and Naimoli Tennis Center on Sept. 17 for NJIT’s Fall 2025 Career Fair, one of the largest STEM-focused career fairs in the region. Nearly 240 organizations — spanning engineering, computing, architecture, life sciences, management and public service — were on hand to recruit for internships, co-ops, and entry-level roles.

Some might be surprised to learn that a startup company digitizes scents, but making scents made sense to Sriya Chinthalapudi, who in high school became enthralled by a TED talk about detecting diseases from a person’s odor and spent many hours learning more on her own.

She shared that memory in spring 2024 while interviewing for a summer internship at Google-funded Osmo Labs, ahead of her senior year as a computer science major at New Jersey Institute of Technology. After graduating in May 2025, she became a full-time software engineer there.

Vibha Venkataraman ’26 (Data Science) and Tina Thai ’26 (Computer Science), two students in NJIT’s Ying Wu College of Computing (YWCC) and both Albert Dorman Honors College scholars, will have added their respective first and second place wins during this year’s Bank of America (BOA) Codeathon to an already impressive list of achievements when they graduate in May.